CHANGING YOUR CAPITAL

[PLOPPY]

Hi, is it possible to swap your capital to a poor production province get a big loan wait for the payments to finish then swap your capital back to your old one thus leaving one province in massive negative gold. If so if you do it a second time the nagative gold would eat into your new loan amount. is my understanding correct.

[samyoboy]

yes but problem is you would then have to pay that loan back and once a provence goes over a certian amount of debt you can't move army or research or build anything. Or so i have read. I have never had it happen to me so can't say from experience.

[dupecmar]

Hi, is it possible to swap your capital to a poor production province get a big loan wait for the payments to finish then swap your capital back to your old one thus leaving one province in massive negative gold. If so if you do it a second time the nagative gold would eat into your new loan amount. is my understanding correct.

Samiboy gave you good answer. I also can't remember what's the limit before your province is blocked. I think it's something like 1 milion but i could be very wrong. Search on forum i'm sure there is an answer. Of course you understand that province you choose to be capital would be blocked for veeeeeeery long time if you take big loan.

But there is one trick. You can be for example 4 millions in negative gold and still your economy wouldn't block for as long as you have enough gold in other provinces (let's say 3.5 millions)

By the way capital is only useful for taking loan and i see no reason why you would return your capitol from province in negative gold except to take another loan 

[reni]

limit is -5 million 

[AddisMakem]

Just want to make sure I have understood this correctly because it's the first time I've seen it.

As I understand, what has been said is:  If the debt in any one province goes above 5 million then one cannot conduct research, construct buildings or move army (or launch attacks?) from any other province in the Empire.  Is that correct?

If so, it seems sensible but should be set out clearly in the laws of the game.

[blackdeath]

its a very good strategy at the beginning of the game, but you must be smart which province you want to sacrifice. you take the loans and maintain the negative balance under 5 million, do huge research and colonize at least 6 more provinces so the one that is negative wouldnt hinder your progress. then when your economy is strong and your production high, especially focusing in wood and stone, you pay the negative and develop the sacrificed province. that way you benefit from the loan to make you fly, and you pay when it hurts your economy the least.

[samyoboy]

Just want to make sure I have understood this correctly because it's the first time I've seen it.

As I understand, what has been said is:  If the debt in any one province goes above 5 million then one cannot conduct research, construct buildings or move army (or launch attacks?) from any other province in the Empire.  Is that correct?

If so, it seems sensible but should be set out clearly in the laws of the game.

you are right. I agree is very good thing. I think it is written in rules somewhere or quite a few old threads is how I knew of it was from old threads I read. I don't use loans. (well except for when I sold over 200k wood by mistake for 75 gold each. in first month of era. Had to take loan then to move my army. )

[Tarantio]

yes - a good tactic if you feel that way inclined. you can of course take the loan, switch your capital to pay it of and when ready to take another loan switch the capital back to where you want the gold placed and when you have it switch the capital back to your negative province, nothing wrong with that, and that is i imagine why they hve the 5 million limit or we all be doing it permanantely lol

[reni]

This rule is born not because of bank loans  

In fact this rule was firstly used, because many farmers started to hire a lot of trebuchets and move them to a single province. Looking that sieges don't need army save, they were happy not to do nothing more in that province, but simply used it to pay upkeep of sieges army. Of course balance of that province always went to negative, but in general, they (farmers) were not paying upkeep at all, considering their game as they were playing without 1 province. Looking that generally they had 10 in 4 months realm, it was easy to understand this was very profitable... Habing so much army networth without paying upkeep and practically indestructible.

This was the reason why IO put a rule where the total gold balance can't be less than -5 million, or you will not be able to construct or research anything...  

[AddisMakem]

Hmm..  all interesting stuff - thank you

A couple of follow ups if I may - especially for blackdeath.

Firstly I think this could be an excellent economic strategy and entirely valid - after all most western economies post-war economic growth was fuelled by Keynsian debt financing. Trick I guess is to avoid what happened to heavily debt burdened African economies after the nightmare of monetarism was introduced by Reagan, Thatcher and other neanderthals.  Also like samyoboy I've not yet taken a loan: I have always regarded it as a form of insurance in case my army comes back to a province with negative gold and I was under attack.

So

1. are we sure about the levels?  That is to say do we know that other provinces will be unaffected by the debt level until the debt in the province reaches 5 million?

2. is there an offset i.e. do the asset balances in the other provinces counter balance the debt in the selected debt bearing province?  I know I wouldn't be able to build or research from that province and that there would be little point in building barracks there but I would hate to be unable to move my armies around and launch attacks from other provinces

3. are we sure that the rules won't suddenly be changed?  Imagine if the level suddenly dropped to 2 million - if the debt level in the province was at 4.5 million then everything would be royally fucked.

4. as I understand it you can take as many loans in an era as you want but only one at a time.  So, presumably the best thing is to take a small loan (to minimise interest) every week?

5. Presumably for this strategy to work really effectively you have to get university levels as high as possible as soon as possible?

[AddisMakem]

Couple of other questions I forgot 

1.  why produce wood and stone in particular?  I hardly ever invest in stone as I don't think forts have any use apart from the marginal one of increasing production and surely iron always gets a better return than stone?
2.  Blackdeath - is your strategy largely economic?  Personally I'd prefer to get my military researches done first ie so I can get elites as soon as possible and smack up mil acad so I can launch 8 or 9 attacks a day.  Or am I missing something fundamental?

[samyoboy]

wood 0.6 gold each, iron 3.1 gold each stone 1thats the prices in r50

[AddisMakem]

Apologies blackdeath - just seen your sig and it's clear that you're a warrior.  In which case I'm even more curious why you advocate researching centralisation rather than military

[Tarantio]

centraliation is good early in the game to get a decent economy on the go, the very good players that last the era tend to stick to economy building until around 15000 points when they start to automatically unload resources being transported between provinces and therefore 'hidden', getting the cent early allows those provinces to grow, even when pilaged you cant stop good growth with high levels of medicine, LATER in the game the focus changes to military but by then they have very good inome to support vast armies and continue researches. I have played as a ruthless pillager/warrior and general pain in the arse strategy from very early only to suddently be dominated by superior firepower later in the game. all depends on realm rules and length as to what strategy to best adopt

[blackdeath]

@addis..... first of all, the debt is counter balanced by the gold in your other provinces, secondly, i stress on wood and stone production especially in the beginning of the era to maximise use of workers. if you go to produce iron you will find that all your workers are in a hole digging iron while your economy suffers. I am speaking about economy addis, i am a serious warrior but all warlords who are successful needs to have something to support them. i realised that with v4a you need a strong economy if you wish to be a killer, i played last era like i played in v4, big mistake. i was killing and killing but with the new trade system the enemies/victims hid their resources, so if you dont have resources to fuel your army you are screwed. so my new strategy is do develop economy for the first 90 days then use that as a base for my military developement. the era has 68 days or something like that and i did 9 provinces, now i can develop my elites faster.