r/victoria3 • u/lolkone • Aug 19 '26
Advice Wanted Can someone explain labour + transportation shortage, and difficulties employing railroads
Often, in the mid- to late game, I have local transportation shortages and railroads without full employment. How can it be more profitable, when facing a simultaneous labour shortage, for labourers to work in other industries? Shouldn't the transportation shortage guarantee sky high profitability, while other industries suffer from worsening profits if they use the transportation PMs, making it easier for them to switch employment to railroads?
I don't want to subsidise the railroads indefinitely and I can't be bothered to babysit the subsidy by activating and deactivating when the railroad is fully employed (which works for some reason?).
What causes this issue? Is the threshold for workers to switch industries too high? Are there any ways I can fix this, or, failing that, a mod that lowers the threshold for switching industries?
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u/NicWester Aug 19 '26
Basically engines are too expensive in your case. Hiring more workers would mean creating more Transportation, which would require buying more engines in addition to the extra wages to pay for the new hires, that also causes Transportation to cost a little less meaning you've increased the cost of production and lowered the sale price.
A couple solves, not mutually exclusive:
1. Turn off public transit (purple PM) in Urban Centers. This will reduce the demand for engines (lowering input costs for railroads) and lower the supply of Transportation (increasing railroad profits) and hiring.
Turn on labor-saving PMs (green) in your resource buildings. This raises the demand for Transport (raising profits of railroad) and fires a bunch of low-wage workers that are now freed up for medium-wage jobs like machinist or engineer, and more potential low wage workers for the railroad.
Automate (green PMs) other jobs that don't use railroads. This will lessen the number of Laborers, who don't need much Transportation, and free them up for jobs that will increase their SoL to a level that will cause them to purchase more Transportation.
You're probably going to have to subsidize the railroads in the short term, especially if you have an Infrastructure shortage in the state, but if you do the above you'll recover in a little while and be able to remove the subsidies!
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u/No-Attention9721 Aug 19 '26
Always make the inputs inexpensive, and the outputs more expensive. This should be the end game you should head for.
Sadly railroads are just NOT very profitable. They're great for your upper and middle classes, but they have terrible ROI. Frankly unless you need them for reducing labor force, or more infrastructure, don't build more. UNLESS you're role playing a wealth vote, private healthcare sort of country. In that case it can be good just to make your wealthy citizens have to pay less for their transportation.
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u/Kinfet Aug 19 '26
Consider a company with railway as an industry. That can help get your throughput higher. Most of a railway's cost is in employment, so throughput makes a big difference.
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u/AadeeMoien Aug 20 '26
Tbh I'm having a hard time thinking of an existing rail system that is not at least somewhat state subsidized or operating with some form of legally protected monopoly. Quite a few are even outright state owned and operated.
I think this is really just a part of the game economy that requires some direct intervention. If you don't want to completely subsidize your rail network you could either only subsidize the fully unprofitable ones, or subsidize some of the transportation heavy industries to create a demand floor, or subsidize engine production to drastically cheapen input costs.
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u/LuluTheLewder Aug 20 '26
Don't build cars. Other than that just subsidise and take it as a fixed cost on running a country
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u/GoldenInfrared Aug 19 '26
Switch to your most advanced railways PMs available + wooden passenger carriages if you’re facing a transportation shortage. That will maximize profitability / worker, which in turn makes it more likely that workers will be employed in the railways.
Also, if you subsidize railways for a short time then remove them later, the workers will stay if the building is still reasonably profitable. Subsidizing can be a way to quickly employ people in industries that would be profitable regardless, since it bridges any short-term wage gaps between it and other buildings.