Automation

M&T 3.0 has a hugely complex economy that requires micro-intensive engagement by the government to influence it properly. Invest too much in property and wages will go sky high, turning profits into losses. Invest too little and unemployment will grow, lowering income and turning your pops to banditry. Also, you probably want to pay maintenance for your state's properties, or else they will wither away. While in a small nation you could feasibly keep an eye on investments and maintenance yourself, for larger countries this can become an attention nightmare. Luckily, there are two automation functions to help you out: Delegated Property Maintenance and Automatic Investment. Both of these are utility decisions.



Delegated Property Maintenance
Delegated Property Maintenance makes sure state properties are properly maintained. 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 112 "Delegated Property Maintenance" allows you to turn it on or off. By default Delegated Property Maintenance is turned on.

Automatic Investment
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% en 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). Before you check previous investments, be sure to select the provinces that you are interested in!