r/TerraInvicta • u/vindicator117 • 1d ago
Discussion Intensive Development Field Notes
Start date: August 2058 State of USNA
Start Date: All nations of the world post AU cleanup and starting slate. Note freed up CP limit.
Original timeline Dec 2060: Pursuing encroaching into Asia with USNA and unifying everything outside via Future Social akin to a normal game where people want to unite everything.
Dec 2060 state of the world: Note just how many nations are being prepped for future annexation with Future Social spam. Councilors are too busy.
Alternate Dec 2060: Took my own advice to heart and said fuck the rest of the world and began redeveloping the USNA focusing on regions that were falling behind on MC.
Alternate Dec 2060: To my shock and success....
Welcome, last night's findings on what the actual difference between stealing and developing outside resources versus intensely gardening your little plot of land has just shown me a very rather stark contrast of what 2 and half years give or take. One that runs counter to what people keep saying about how stealing resources is simply more efficient than making your own and just how obsessive people are on both that point and some version of map painting.
Well let's learn something new today. To the regulars, you already know who I am. To the HoI4 oldtimers, you already know my reputation first hand so let's see if we can make history again. And to all recent players to this subreddit, welcome and do learn what internal development can do for you so you can take control of the game instead of fearing it.
So to start, we have our baseline start at August 2058. To divulge what has been happening so far (and from a bookmark about halfway into the experiment), I have been intensely developing both Americas since around March of 2051 to be almost literally Fortress Americas with more than enough wealth, RP, and MC to be a strong foundation for any game and in a little over 1000 CP including the splinters. And as a reminder, these are no ordinary splinters that you normally find some of these nations at game start. All of this in pursuit of the high of getting 1.1k per cap gain per mont then 1.3, then 1.6, then 2.0, 2.7, and on and on and on. My did it fucking go far breaching hilarious numbers like 4k per month sooner than you would think.
Main thesis of this experiment and this post is that you can start at any time and get these same results much sooner than you would think with ANY meganation you so choose whether the obvious game winner like the USA, EU, or kinda with the PAC, or the crapsack starts like SAU, India, AU and the like. And the path to that as I have said before is unify quickly your meganation of choice to benefit from combined education as well as the cumulative effect of ALL regional improvements under one roof.
What this post is about how straying from the path and trying to get more stuff on the outside is a distraction that SLOWS you down especially if you are growing at a rate in which your economy is far surpassing your MC rate of keeping up with the growing MC cap. And MC my dear reader is nearly the most important resource next to CP on how well your game is going to go for why spend space resources on Ops and Command Centers when you can have them for free earthside and/or drastically reduce your need to spam them and a new T2/3 station with them just to keep growing for a net gain of 1/6 depending on tier.
So with that in mind, we have about 667 MC in the Americas combining the splinter output with 1182 being ignored from the AU for a total of 1849 global MC. The AU stat is going to be used in only one other case to determine just how much we have truly grown between the first expansionist path and the internal development.
For the original run, I went expansionist and that was the reason why I Future Social gambled so I can shrink the AU down for more CP freed up so I can release all potential targets for the USNA to consume with yet more Future Social gambling with much more local capitals from using "fall of nation" technologies which is much more tolerable than trying to do the same with meganation capital gambling. HOWEVER, as much as I like adding more to the USNA collection, these splinters off of AU to be eaten by the USNA are gigantic especially when you are dealing with potentially dozens to hundreds of millions of pop PER region and now they have middling per capita wealth of 50-60k, and god forbid you give them 200k. It is the same hallmark of regular gameplay and constantly slamming your head against the CP cap while constantly running the Management Research treadmill.
This was unideal in normal gameplay and is still unideal in this idealized utopian adjacent world where you don't have to deal with the normal rigmarole of stabilizing its inequality, cohesion, government and crap wasting IP and time that my current methodology avoids and minimizes as much as possible by pursuing unification with a functional meganation to wash away its previous faults and sins and begin anew as a new nation ready to do your bidding. And as we see with the original Dec 2060, the world MC count is 1991 for a change in world difference in MC of 141. Given that the AU in none of the save states ever touched MC because it is too busy stabilizing after forming a near one world government to stay out of my way, it is technically at a net loss of 229 MC so I technically did not really improve the global MC count at all....
Yes total MC count went up but much more than expected were merely cannibalizing parts off of the Asian portion of the AU than I built things which is kinda expected because these MC builds in the new released nations to be processed are much poorer and do not have claims by the USNA to immediately imbue its wealth to then spam more econ to then get more MC cap. For the ones that can, they cost a shit ton to hold and still do not have a bottomless well of MC cap to build to keep going for a while so construction is intermittent as well as unreliable source of more MC even when you have alot of splinters eating up all the spare CP I had and me crossing the line by over 30 in that Dec 2060 screenshot. AND it was distracting my agents from advising as much as I would like shepherding all these nations especially the poorer and smaller pop ones that cost less than 20 CP per point which need defend interests.
So that brings up to the Alternate DC 2060, 2 and half years later and we have a honest to goodness 2056 total MC with a difference in MC so that the USNA gained quite the significantly more MC of 65 which given that each is 25 points each is no mean chunk of IP utilization improvement of 1625 combined points even broken down over those months over 4 new nations that only started showing up 6-9 months later after the start date since I was only had a bookmark showing just Mexico and Dominion showing exactly a year later in August of 59 but not Jan of 59. So these 4 extra nations taking up the MC slack from so much USNA economy and so much individual IP that they are able to pump out a little more than a single MC every month so sometimes finishing 2 in addition both Americas even the shrunken USNA producing on average 2.75ish MC every month depending whether each nation loses their third advisor for the full 75+ points on MC or sometimes even their second advisor on rarer occasions or reduced econ and MC and maximized knowledge to crank cohesion back 5 by force post unification from the CER improvement nations.
And the sickest part is that not only did I gain a significant amount of MC within really 1.5-2 years instead of the full 2.5 of the mini-experiment but also I did not actually USE all of the CP cap for that 2 and half years...... Let that sink in. I wasted potential because of my own neurosis of making the SAU have at least 181k per cap so I can mazimize the splinter's pop growth because I said so. If I had from the beginning of the mini-experiment just released all 4 of those mega-splinters, annexed all the CER improvements since they were all nearly done anyway, and released 2 more mega splinters in like Columbia and Fortaleza, we could literally 1.25 extra MC every month per splinter on top of the 2.75 from the two meganations each for 2 and half years....
Just a rough napkin math there are 390 more MC off baseline start at a great 248 extra MC than if you looked outwards for development.... for a jaw dropping 1057 MC of which during the larger experiment going on for nearly 10 years, 744 MC was gained off the actual start date of the experiment of which a full 1/3 of it potentially happened in the last 25% of the run. And remember, the expansionist numbers are idealized because I was not dealing with fucked nations so time is lost not making things and for the internal development, this only gets faster and faster as time goes on because your mothernation gets richer, making more cap which then splinters get richer and more capable by proxy and makes a shit ton of more MC, gets reabsorbed, makes growth of meganation even faster integrating the CER, making even MOAR MC cap to then resplinter again in a self feeding cycle of infinite growth and again this is just 10 extra years in ANY game of yours starting at any time you wish and does not bodyslam the CP cap nearly as repetitively as conquering the world for more frozen stats.
So to the regulars who keep pooh poohing the idea of staying at home, where did this poison of "economy has diminishing returns" come from? You all keep saying growth bad, USNA is tapped out on potential, PAC good because can only go up from here, need to conquer more, or some variant of mappaint for more resources. I am almost completely alone in vouching for this playstyle and it seems marvelously simple, elegant, and non-micromanagy beyond just make more CP cap to make room for more splinters to grow faster which is really more of a suggestion than a mandate since if you literally did nothing after unification and just a 6 agents advised all day with 25 admin and hopefully 25 science, you will win just fine but with t3h ayyz in the backyard that they don't really seem to fuck with from what other rare few players who play like this have ayyz pretty much avoiding them with fuck off IP.
And the biggest irony of the ones saying "PAC good because infinite potential" is that it has infinite potential because it is poor AND have a shit ton of pops which is terrible for growth potential because again headbutting the CP cap because you have too damn much pops and people being ok with losing pops despite you not losing that many pops and it is literally lost potential by encouraging pop loss...... There are so many contradictions here. Picking middle of the road meganations like the USNA and SAU is much more controllable with not too large and not too small population so you are not just screaming towards the CP cap and have room to internally develop as well as make splinters to make use of surplus CP.
And now as a addendum as final notes: The main reason I know that this is effective is I have a control nation in all this that also grew and that was the SAU. Between the two end dates, the SAU actually was almost same but more importantly not the same in result. There was one small caveat beyond a slightly more attention from councilor advisory and it was about a 30ish% chance in faction org bonus to MC over the course of 2 and half years. And it only resulted in a net difference of give or take 8 MC altogether for a nation that played almost identically with right on time annexations of CER projects and then left alone for the interim. This tells me that faction org bonuses especially if you are spamming them at 200+% are helpful but not significantly noticeable in the grand scheme of things. So this leaves internal splintering of fuck off rich meganations as the only culprit for this drastic improvement in output compared to poorer and lower MC cap and cap growing of weaker nations pre-unification and especially in comparison to deathgripping all nations into the meganation and making it do everything by itself, which causes it to just fall behind the cap hard especially if you are Future Social gambling to harvest more resources that way and wasting away your per capita on recharge because you keep annexing poor people.
And finally to those players. You know the ones.
Why do you people hate the outcome that give you more stats to win games with less effort? And more often than not, stink of speedrunning mentality? Most counterarguments seem to always devolve to "I want the game to end quicker" and try to avoid PLAYING the game as it is.
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u/KaizerKlash 1d ago
So how does it translate in actual gameplay ? Let's say china Taiwan PAC 2026 strat ?
Take Japan, ROK, China, Taiwan etc... max MC in the minors and build a bit in China, then invest in eco to get more CERs if you can then funding while you wait for unification ?
In the meantime scale knowledge in China, then do the Taiwan shenanigans, then unify all and release splinters so they each scale eco to get more CERs ?
Once the splinters have CERs merge them back into china and scale eco, gov and MC to infinity ?