I’ve played 2 games of France now, and each goes the same way. Everything is fine and dandy, we have a surplus of funds comming in, there is no change in policies, unemployment goes down, GDP goes up and -BAM- I’m going over a 100 billion euro in debt every turn suddenly (I even lost the ‘uncompetetive economy’ thingy). My income drops sharply and my expedenditure rises dramaticaly. Is this intended? Is it a bug? What the hell is going on?
Without seeing your data, it’s hard to pin down any particular cause. Were you hit by any negative events e.g. market meltdown, credit crunch?
One thing that will certainly be having an effect is that France starts with the global economic cycle set at 0.96 in contrast to the UK and US at 0.28. This basically means that after a couple of years, you hit the global economic peak and it starts to cycle back to recession. This downward drag on your GDP will slowly reduce your tax income, although it shouldn’t be directly affecting expenditure. Do you have some slow-burning policies starting to kick in, e.g. rail subsidies, space program, etc?
I do have space program, but that’s only 12 billion euro, I’m talking about a massive drop (without changing taxes or anything) my unemployment was steadily decreasing and my GDP rising, and I had just gotten rid of “uncompetetive economy”.
Can I post a picture? Here is a screenshot I took with steam cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/104 … B6C82FBE5/
It’s a shame that I can’t figure out how to view it more in-depth to see what exactly happened on that massive drop, I was basically going at a 20-30 billion surplus per quarter to a defficit of over 100 billion every quarter, just a massive sudden downturn. I guess it’s related to that global economy drop?
Presuming we’re looking at the crash midway through that graph, that looks like a textbook market meltdown to me.
If you look at the gold GDP line and find the high point, you’ll see an ‘event’ marker at that time. I’m guessing that was market meltdown. The next turn, your GDP crashes. The turn after that, your tax income is calculated from the new rubbish GDP, and your income drops like a stone. Expenditure also climbs; I’m guessing either a spike in welfare bills (more unemployment so more unemployed benefit) or coincidentally, you’d introduced an expensive policy the turn before.
…ouch. Again looking at the icons on the bottom, cyberwarfare was triggered the turn your income crashed. This produced a second drop in GDP… ouch ouch ouch!
Pretty painful economic times, but I hope that sheds some light on what happened.
Yeah, thanks for the clarifications. Does the economy ever recover though? I see my GDP is trying to climb upwards, but it seems like my income isn’t reaching the same levels as it was before (if you look earlier in the graph and compare GDP levels to before and after the crash when they are at somewhat equal points).
I can’t be sure without knowing how far into the game you were at that point, but I suspect the answer relates to my first post. Because France gets to start at the top of the global economic cycle, you get maybe a years honeymoon before the global economy starts slipping slowly and surely back into recession (even before any events trigger). There’s a certain amount of ‘springback’ following a meltdown as the event slowly wears off over time, but bear in mind with every turn, the global economy is getting slightly worse - see how the light blue line never returns to its original value? Also, from what I can make out with the icons at the bottom, it seems you never cured the cyberwarfare attacks, which left a permanent drag on your GDP.
Okay, I think I’ve got the hang of it now, after an absolutely brutal recession which lasted an entire 5 year term, I managed to get back on track 
this gives me hope, because it seems to always crash like that for me.
My first D3 playthrough (as an experienced D2 player) ended the same way – playing as canada the global economy collapsed, deficit went sky high, tried to plug the widening gap with a luxury tax, got hit with a brain drain (which absolutely crushed my GDP) - got downgraded again, got assasinated. My popularity was 68%. LOL
having the global cycle increase deficts by that much is out of proportion IMO. and brain drain is way too amped up - i chuckled when it kicked in though.