Meiou And Taxes Guide
Owoeye Heatley
Investing can be thought of as investing into infrastructure of a province to utilize resources to a greater extent. You can access the investment table by clicking on the macro builder and then clicking on the building tab. You can see two different types here;
Rural and urban, you can see more about how to interact with various industries and how to do so in the investment guide. One important thing to note is that rural does have a cap that is based on the province size and how good the land is. The resource expands as tech progresses, while urban/districts do not have a cap and can be invested ad infinitum.
For urban areas, while there is no cap, there are certain areas that are better for building cities than others. Ones with natural features, natural harbors or a natural land route are typically places where cities can find themselves being built with great ease. While cities can be built in any province, these provinces will be much more efficient to urbanize. General rule of thumb is to only invest as much as you are capable of, if you have a smaller economy, invest small at first, then put more investments as your industries get bigger and more profitable. (Note: For newer players, do not invest in commerce, as it is quite a volatile industry).
There are 6 sets of Infrastructure; Capitol (for Nation Governance), Amenities (For supporting an Urban populace and industry), Garrisons (for reducing unrest and increasing local defensiveness to protect your provinces), Pathing (to increase trade output and improve CE in your provinces), Irrigation (To improve productivity in crop and fiber growth), and finally Harbourage (for Coastal/River Regions, to improve CE and link overseas regions). These are built using the province selection tool found here or can be found in MacroBuilder with the red pin on the center. You can change how the tool selects provinces by going into decisions and clicking the select estate decision, which will cycle through the various types of selection. Once you have selected your province(s), you may then click on the decision (Build Infrastructure) which will then pull up a list of infrastructure to build and to what level. We highly recommend you use Parallelism 10, always use Improve to X Ranks (Which will be in Yellow at the top)and always build 2-3 extra units to deal with infrastructure decay.
However, while infrastructure does typically need to be built by hand (however the powerbrokers will build some themselves sometimes), we do have a method that allows for you to skip out on the investment portion. There are certain parameters (That are shown here) that must be fulfilled for a province to get investment from the AutoInvestor.
The AutoInvestor is perfect when it comes to short-term investment, it is better than even the most skilled player at detecting very small investments/large investments that generate money for you. This takes only into account how much money you can make from investing in those provinces with the parameters you have given it. To activate auto-investor you will need to click on the Select Estates Button until it says All Stated Provinces, click on any stated province, and click the selection button, and it will automatically select all stated cores for you nation. After that, you click on "Show Utility Decisions" and go down to the bottom where it says "Add Selected Provs to Investment' ', make sure Automatic investment is on and click on Investment Manager and then it will present with a number of options. We highly recommend that you select 30% of the Treasury every 3 years for all new players to begin with and disable urban investments (which can be found in the advanced options). If you are wondering if you have done it correctly, you can go down in the Investment Manager Event Box and click Show currently selected province for investment. You can then go to the trade screen and you should see a large number of blue or red boxes covering your nation. If you see this after clicking the trade screen, congratulations! The auto investor is set up and ready to go. You can disable this at any time by simply opening the utility decisions and disabling automatic investment
In 3.0 there is an entirely new estate that has many important interactions and it is the center of 3.0, which would be the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is a group of individuals that are employed directly by the state to do it's bidding. This estate has privileges and reforms of their own that will unlock new taxes, more efficient soldier recruitment, reduce autonomy and more. However, most of these reforms and privileges are gated off behind the need for a state building structure. This is a progress that will take it's time and will vary from nation to nation, depending on the situation. The easiest way to begin building a bureaucracy is to expand it to more parts of the realm, this can be done through accessing the Direct Your Bureaucracy Tab in the estates menu
This causes your bureaucracy to expand throughout the realm at a pace that is dictated by your various bureaucracy reforms, privileges, institutions and ideas (bureaucracy ideas make this more efficient). After 10 years, the expansion will complete and if the situation permits it, you can direct your bureaucracy to expand once more. Overtime, once a bureaucracy grows very large, and without bureaucratic privilege and reforms, can become very corrupt. Bureaucratic loyalty is the inverse of the total national provincial corruption, so when the bureaucracy is corrupt, it becomes controlled by the powerbrokers. This is often the case directly after major reforms, as the status quo has been shaken up and various powerbrokers have taken over the vacuum. This is normal however, and typically will go back down as the reforms settle into society, uncontrollable corruption is typically the result of high state reach without proper reforms, so it may be wise to stop expanding the bureaucracy every now and again to reform your bureaucratic privileges before expanding further.
This is the reform screen, it can be accessed by clicking the estates tab after clicking on your nation's flag and then clicking on the estate tab in the far right. You can see the various effects of each privilege by either hovering over them or clicking on them
To reform these privileges, you will need to fulfill the requirements and have the proper amount of mana for it, once these conditions are fulfilled, the option will become a bright white, meaning it can be enacted. Reforms are a bit different. Reforms are complete changes in civil/social structure, you must meet those requirements,which are usually greater than most reforms, and then, once the requirements are met, the arrow will turn green, meaning that the reform is now ready to be enacted (picture). Once you click on the arrow, you will receive a screen that looks like this
Which will allow you to either enact it immediately, or you can click further reforms, which will put the reform on pause for 6 months until you enact another reform. What this allows is a chain reform or a "Package" of different reforms. This can lead to a large increase in corruption and loss of stability but a large boost in state capabilities. If you fail to reform, or you back off after realising something, reforming will go on cooldown for 5-10 years, meaning you cannot enact a reform again. Some very important bureaucratic reforms ( All reforms and privileges cost mana to enact or get rid of, please be sure to look at the amount and the requirements before deciding any sort of reform or package reform. )
Power and Powerbrokers are no longer simply represented by just a single group owning a province and commanding it, now there are multiple hands within the pot that will control various sectors of the economy, land and people. This can vary province by province, state by state and tag by tag, no two places will typically have the same proportion of power brokers, but that overall power is summed from the various provinces into the estate screen, which can be thought of as the 'national sum' of the power of all power brokers in your state (State, Nobility, Tribal, Burghers, Clergy). At the beginning of the game, for the vast majority of tags, power has been decentralized to these powerbrokers. Unlike in 2.52, these power brokers are not all bad, they manage your land, they comprise the majority of your military and pay you taxes. However, they will never reach the same efficiency as a fully state-run modern bureaucracy, and some privileges will hinder your ability to reach your full potential as a nation (Such as Rural Autonomy, which increases autonomy, Both military and tax obligations along with Noble Courts). Trying to hammer your nobility without a state army to back you up will lead you being often without much of an army and not many friends, leaving you open to attack from both outside and internal. If you do disrupt them and make them upset, worry not, as there are now tools for you to placate and improve relations with your estates. Each negative action towards an estate or reform will drop their mood and relations, to recover this, you need to do supportive actions such as marrying the nobility or supporting commerce to increase relations back to a better resting point for the powerbrokers. This will then translate to mood, which you can see here, which can improve various aspects of the functioning of your state. Mood is a constant balance between positive and negative and it will take time and experience to learn how to properly balance relations while keeping reforms at a steady pace.
The estates have been changed quite a bit. Most notably the Greater- and Lesser Nobles have been merged, and there is now a bureaucracy estate. Also in game there is now a distinction between Elites (the provincial estates), and Factions (their national representatives in the government). The Elites each have a loyalty and power percentage per province. Note that the loyalty value you see for the bureaucracy is actually their corruption percentage inverted, and that each estate individually can have a power percentage from 0 to 100% (so the total is not 100%). E.g. the Nobles and Burghers can both have 100% power, meaning the Burghers rule the cities, and the Nobles rule the rural areas.
64591212e2