Money makes the world go round, and so having plenty of it is important to a successful campaign. Here’s how to make money in Victoria 3.
At the heart of Victoria 3 is the emergence of capital and markets. The world has moved from a world of lords to one of investors. Whatever path you choose to follow in Victoria 3, you need to make money to venture down it.
Understanding Your Economy
Instead of having a set amount of cash, Victoria 3 is all about balancing the books. Your ability to invest, build and run services is limited by your turnover. You can see at the top of the UI whether or not you are running a net gain or a net loss. Ideally, you want your nation to be profiting each month. But it isn’t always necessary.
In the ‘economy’ display, you will see that there is a surplus pool and a debit pool. This is how much wealth you can store for a rainy day and how much you can borrow before governmental run services stop. If you are hitting your cap, then you may want to spend some money. You could invest in new buildings or you could lower tax. If you are in debit, then you will pay interest on governmental loans – but this is only a problem if you are still in a net loss.
The most important factor to your money making in Victoria 3 is how your economy works. This is determined by the laws on economy you are using. Most obvious is your tax policy which governs what you tax and by how much. You can hover over the ‘enact’ bar of each policy to see if you would get more money by changing systems. Read more about changing laws here.
Your economic system is another major factor to your income, but it’s harder to quantify. To oversimplify it, this controls what is government run or subsidised, and what is privately run and invested in. This will affect the following money-making tips.
Make Money in Victoria 3 by expanding industries
The most likely way to increase your turnover in Victoria 3 is to expand profitable industries. If you are making a lot of money from iron mines for example, creating more will bring more profit. But only if you are able to provide the workers and resources necessary. You could also seek to build up new industries that will satisfy your economy. If the government runs the mines you will gain the profit directly. If not, you will still improve your income as you are creating more wealth that you are taxing.
You can also look at the production methods of each building. Providing you have the right technology, you can change what resources are used and what is produced and how much. Using this, you can change the profit margins based on what you have available.
Trading for profit
Trade is another way to generate wealth in Victoria 3. By creating trade routes, you are able to tax the goods that are exchanged between you and another market. This depends on your trade policy: free trade means there are no tariffs and being isolationist means you can’t make trade at all. Free trade may make some resources available that help boost your industry and so can generate growth and therefore still contribute heavily to growth. Go to the ‘market’ tab to see resources that have a bad buy to sell order ratio, and this will inform you of what is worth importing and exporting to make your industries more profitable.
These methods will help improve your income, but may also affect how much you spend. You will have some government-run industries that rely on resources to work: construction, governmental buildings and the military are always governmentally run to some degree. The resources these industries use will directly impact your income. It is in your interest to make these resources as cheap as possible.
The more you have of these resources, the better. And while expanding an industry means more wealth in your nation, if it increases the price of goods that you are paying for then it can make you worse off.
Our advice is: for the most part, build broadly. If you delve deep into one industry that can be volatile and have drastic impact in ways you may not have anticipated.
