Industry guide

This page is supposed to allow the player to start interacting with the in-game economy system with as little effort as possible. For in-depth explanations about these systems visit Industry page.

Basics
Each industry requires at least 2 things to operate:
 * Property
 * Labour

Keep in mind that labour is also used to built infrastructure units - if there is a big labour deficit in a province (most likely due to overinvestment), your infrastructure will not be built!

More advanced industries also require inputs, and industries will manage acquiring those themselves via internal or external trade - you can create industries that will produce those inputs to increase their availability and make them cheaper to acquire via internal trade, or place merchants in more trade nodes connecting back to your home node to create more opportunities for external trade.

There can only be 16 different industries in any given province at the same time.

Rural industry
Almost all of the rural industries use resources as their property, meaning their size is limited by the availability of said resource in the province:
 * '''Mines
 * '''Farmlands
 * '''Forestries
 * '''Fisheries

The only Rural industry that does not use any resource but a district instead is cottage industry.

All rural industries use rural labour that is coming from peasants.

Urban and Elite industry
All of the Urban and Elite industries use districts as property:
 * '''Industrial
 * '''Academic
 * '''Commercial

Districts are not limited in their size by properties of the province, and as such can theoretically grow infinitely. Practically though, their size will be limited by available labour and their profitability.

Urban industry
Uses urban labour coming from residents.

There are various industry specialisations:
 * Armaments
 * Ship
 * Houseware
 * Textile
 * Luxury cloth
 * etc.

Rather than there being hundreds of different goods, most of them are merged into more broad categories, for example both Houseware and Textile industries produce mostly "Consumer" goods while also producing some "Luxury" goods, which is also produced in higher amounts by Luxury Cloth industries. For full list of what every industry produces using which inputs visit Trade goods page.

Academic industry
Uses literate or clergy labour (depending on whether education is higher or religious) coming from 1% of urban population or clergy respectively.

It outputs knowledge, which is required to maintain some of the buildings and to unlock most of the institutions. All population classes also consume small amounts of knowledge to fill their luxury needs.

Commercial industry
Uses burgher labour coming from burghers.

It outputs commerce, which is responsible for trading goods between sectors. The amount produced can be modified by provincial modifiers, infrastructure, laws and privileges. The more commerce your city produces, the more goods it can "move". The amount of commerce also determines which provinces become centers of trade, and how much trade value each province gets.

For more information about this visit Trade page

Investing in Industries
Investing is done through the macrobuilders building tab. You can choose to invest in one of the seven property types (both resources and districts) which will later be distributed to corresponding industries. For example investing into "Farmlands" will increase the size of all industries in the province that use farmlands: crop, pasture, plant fibre etc.

Investing is done in batches of 10, 50 and 100 ducats (modified by building cost, AKA "Material cost for projects"). Having low corruption and high state reach increases investment efficiency.

When deciding where to invest, you should look at least at these 2 values:
 * Throughput (visible on 1st page of industry tooltip) - Represents how much of the industry is actually used. Lower throughput increases wages to attract more people to work in industry. But it also means lower profitability because of these higher wages. As such, it is recommended to invest in industries with high throughput, while avoiding investing in provinces with low throughput.
 * 90%+ means it's safe to invest
 * 70%-90% is good for stable growth
 * 50%-70% is fast growth but low profitability
 * 0%-50% is even faster growth but it will take very long for industry to recover, in the meantime there will be no labour available for other projects and this should be avoided
 * Keep in mind that, while throughput affects profitability, having high throughput does not guarantee industry being profitable. There are many more factors to consider, some of which you can check in Factors influencing profitability at the bottom of this page.
 * Profitability (visible on 2nd page of industry tooltip) - should be self-explanatory, but it's important to note that profitable industries will expand on their own if they think expanding is profitable, albeit slower than if country invested. High profitability industries will also reward you with high return of investment (if they maintain profitability after investment). On the other hand, unprofitable industries will shrink in size.

The more you invest relative to current industry size, the bigger impact your investment will have. For example, for a 100 size industry, investing 10 ducats may lower throughput from 100% to 90%, while investing 100 ducats would lower it to 50%. This means this industry would employ people faster, but may also shrink in size because it didnt make enought profits, and in the end your industry will be smaller than if you invested 10 ducats at a time spread out over 10 years, maintaining relatively high throughput. On the other hand, investing the same 10 ducats into 100% throughput size 5 industry, would lower it's throughput to around a devastating 30%, destabilising this industry for a long time. Due to this, it is not recommended to invest a lot of money in industries at a same time - even across multiple provinces - compared to your current industry size. Doing so may lead to a lot of your properties becoming unprofitable, which may be hard to recover, especially in the early game.

In order to decide in what industries to invest in, rather than checking profitability of each industry in every province, you can also conduct a nation-wide census, and in it's "Industry" section check the supply and demand of goods, and invest in industries for which the demand of their output is not met. You should still check this industry throughput and profitability though.

In case of rural industries that use resources as property, you also need to take into account how much room is there left for property to expand. When investing across the country, it is recommended to use special mapmodes to easily determine where the property can be expanded. Investing into a resource that has already reached its maximum size will transfer ownership of these properties to you. Do not invest in resources that are maximum size and fully owned by you, as this threatens the very fabric of the universe.
 * Recommended settings for special mapmode: All my owned provinces/Get the value[...]/Linear/Full color scale/Red-Yellow-Green. Mapmode summary will show you which color represents how much land available.

Cottage industry
Cottage industry is invested in through industrial districts. But it will not receive any of the investment if there is any other industry already present in the province.

Academic
If there is both religious and higher education industries in a province, any investment done by will only go towards higher education.

Opening new Industries
After selecting one or more provinces, investing is done through "Open New Slots" decision. This will open an event with options listing ALL of the industries, together with their output goods. Hovering over any option will show you possible requirements for opening that industry, for example: min 5 urban development, specific resource deposit (you can check these in "Terrain" modifier on province), min 10k urban pop and so on.

If possible (province meeting requirements and enough "industrial slots" remaining), choosing an option will open that industry in the province and deduct 5 ducats from your treasury.

It's possible to open industries in multiple provinces at the same time, just have more of them selected when clicking "Open New Slots" decision. You can even have all your provinces selected, for example if you want to open some type of mine everywhere that's possible but can't be bothered to check where actually do you have any resource deposits (it's also useful for non-core provinces which can't be selected individually). Just remember that, of course, industry will be opened only in provinces meeting the requirements, and you will pay 5 ducats for EACH industry opened.

Some of the more important industries you might want to make sure are present in your country include:
 * Armaments - supplying your army
 * Ship - supplying your navy
 * Higher Education - for improving education and institutions spawning
 * Luxury cloth - for pure profit (and meeting luxury needs)

Factors influencing profitability
(WIP feel free to bring change)
 * Modifiers to production
 * Country:
 * National Ideas
 * Advisors
 * Rights & Reforms
 * Commercialization Institution - provides +15% Urban Output
 * Province:
 * Center of Trade/Production/Learning (for Commerce/Urban/Academic)
 * Irrigation (for Crop and Fibers industries)
 * Trauma
 * Nomad Power
 * Industry:
 * Skill - newly opened industries start with skill of 1, growing up to 100 overtime. Every point of skill provides 0,2% modifier to output of that industry, up to a total of +20% modifier. Skill of industry grows linearly over time.
 * Availability and price of input materials
 * Supply/Demand of output good - High demenad will increase it's price, low demand will lower it
 * Availability and price of labour
 * Inflation
 * Market access (interconnectivity of sector) - having possibilities of importing input materials for cheaper or exporting output goods at a higher cost (preferably both) may increase profitability

Automatic Investment
(The following paragraphs are taken from Automation page.)

Automatic Investment is an optional function designed to help you spend your money wisely. It is toggled on or off by decision. To find it make sure utility decisions are shown; if they are hidden, press decision 109 "Show utility decisions" to access them. Decision 114 "Automatic Investment" allows you to turn it on or off. By default Automatic Investment is turned off.

Once Automatic Investment is turned on, there are a few subsequent actions we have to take. First we need to select the provinces where we want the automatic investor to spend money. This works as it does elsewhere; choose how to select with decision 107 "Select Estate" and then select the province or provinces through the UI buildings. Once selected, we can activate decision 115 "Add selected provinces to Investment". Now we can activate the Investment Manager through decision 116. In the manager we can set the budget, determine how often investments are made, we can review previous investments and we can turn notification of investments on or off. The budget is a percentage of your current treasury set between 0% and 95%, which will be taken from your treasury once Automatic Investment is ready to invest. Investments can happen every three, four or five years.

Once everything is set Automatic Investment will periodically activate. First it will evaluate the provinces you've selected with decision 115 and score them depending on a number of factors, including: Communication Efficiency, Capital location, profitability, size, throughput, income, local trade importance, property maintenance, expansion desire, and others. Capped resources, like farmlands, will be excluded from investment. Once scoring is done it will distribute the budget depending on the designated values. A province with score 50%, for example, will gain an investment up to 50% of the budget. Note that the automatic investor won't over-invest so that it may take less money from the treasury than allowed for in the budget.

Now that Automatic Investment is running, we can choose to have it notify us when it is active or we can review previous investments in the investment manager (decision 116). Both will only work if you select the provinces you're interested in beforehand!

AI investments
Outside our borders the artificial intelligence is making its own investment decisions. The AI has a budget of their own, which is dependent on their goals. Different from the player's automatic investor, the AI will focus more on land than on cities to represent more historic outcomes. Furthermore, AI personalities will influence their decision making. A conqueror for example will have less budget for investment while an industrious leader will make more budget available. A hopeless spender will be more likely to overinvest in their properties.