I took a pause from Space Colony long enough to return to my
attempts to industrialize Brazil. Following the new-player advice at
VickyWiki I'd been trying that country, which combines good size and
natural resources with weak neighbors, utter lack of strategic value
to Great Britain, and not too many preprogrammed events to mess up the
building of experience.
Also following the guide advice I'd focused on developing the
cultural technologies which accrue prestige, grabbed a few quick
colonies in Africa (Ifni and one spot near Ethiopia are great, since
they're one-state provinces and so get you the prestige of colonies
without that pesky competition or expense), and turned to getting the
technologies for Machine Tools. This leaves me dangerously far behind
everyone in military technologies, but when the other powers on the
continent are Paraguay you don't need awesome battle fleets.
The challenge had been building up industry, which was going
slow and apparently not moving much at all. Part of that was trying
to conserve machine parts, which Great Britain alone makes at the start
of the game and which she sells only rarely, if at all. In fact, when
I got machine parts the first factory I built was for machine parts,
and then the factories which make the raw parts for *that*. Still, not
too much development in industrial might, which hung around 20 and only
gradually increased.
But. Well. Sometime last night, in the 1880s, it all of a
sudden *clicked*. Finally I was producing enough raw materials and
enough component parts that the factories are rolling right along.
Suddenly where I'd been happy to have, oh, ex****ts of about 120 and
a daily income of 140 and expenses of 135 pounds, everything shot up
extraordinarily. Ex****ts jumped up around 100 pounds a day, and all
of a sudden I was earning from 50 to 100 pounds a day after expenses!
Before I quite knew what was happening it was 1895 and Brazil
has over 110,000 pounds in the bank.
This does wonders at furthering industralization, too, since
now I can drop in the factories for fabric, clothes, furniture, glass,
and whatever other essentials my people want, so they can buy locally
and ex****t into the world market -- feeding growth rates, too. The
machine parts factory may make only 0.1 a day, but that's 36 parts a
year, more than enough for ordinary use and quickly I had a stockpile
of over 200, which was where I start selling them on the world market.
I'm not sure just what precisely changed; it was like a light
turned on. Pretty quickly the industralization rating jumped from a
bit under 30 to, now in 1895, around 110. That's still put me around
18th in the world, but -- combined with my token advances in military
might (two new infantry, one new ****p unit) and prestige has given me
not just Great Power status, but enough `great power' points to
overtake the United States!
I'm no match for Great Britain, but would you have imagined a
world where Brazil had the role the United States served in our time
line?
Also up in North America for some reason the United States and
Mexico go to war about every five years, the United States overruns
nearly the entire country of Mexico, and then in the peace settlement
takes only about four or five states in a slice. I can't say that by
itself is ridiculous -- from the United States perspective this is
pretty near free land -- and Mexico may well have no choice in the war
since I never see who starts the fighting. The ridiculous thing is
that every war, Mexico gets a bundle of Latin American countries (never
Brazil) to fight with them. ``Hey, Mexico got spanked the last seven
wars, they're sure to have a turnaround this time!'' seems to be the
thinking up in Guatemala.
Oh, and in other weird butterfly effects: France whomped all
over Prussia through the 1870s, at one point even occupying most of
Brandenberg-Prussia, and standing a fair shot at liberating Prussian
Poland before the Prussian government collapsed (again!) and they all
went home. Though France did take a couple of states along the Rhine,
for good luck, I suppose.
--
Joseph Nebus
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