Victoria 3: Sphere of Influence - Bloc Tutorial and Discussion by An Economist Plays

This one's a tutorial and discussion about power blocs and how I evaluate them overall. We look at how to form them, build them, and maintain them through diplomacy... and other means...
My mod list is in my Discord server on the #victoria3 channel. If it was easier to do a Steam collection, I would have done one. :-)

[@SandwichRat]

23:34 is the quietest yell I’ve ever heard.
Great video!

[@An_Economist_Plays]

One must be mindful of one's mic strength. 🙂

[@Destragond]

You probably already know this, but for the sake of tutorial, you get a ton of additional information for your leverage on other countries by first mousing over that shield icon and THEN mousing over the leverage progress bar for your bloc at the bottom of that tooltip (if I remember right). I don't think you get leverage for importing resources from the country or from military power, but two important factors for leverage that you didn't talk about much are 1: owning a percentage of the country's GDP (productive buildings in that country being owned by you) and 2: making the country depend on your resources.
So I think the typical way to go is to fund the construction of raw resource production buildings, like mines, in the country and then exporting finished goods into them, like tools or similar. Basically make those mines productive and dependent on your tools, so you both get the "owning GDP" bonus and the "economic dependency" bonus.

[@An_Economist_Plays]

Very well put. It's something I didn't know well at the time, but do now. There's a new mod that shows how much foreign ownership is in each economy, and it is great for tracking this kind of stuff.

[@Destragond]

I think there's also a map mode that shows for each state how big of a percentage of the state's GDP is actually owned by the nation.

[@An_Economist_Plays]

@Destragond I need to explore to find that!

[@YoSoyAirton]

What would be a good power bloc type for a México or Spain run?

[@An_Economist_Plays]

Mexico has a lot of laws to pass to get to where it needs to be - I would try ideological union.
In the game, the AI has Spain go with religious or trade when it forms, I think either of those make sense, but trade only if it's able to start industrializing.

[@AdventurerPrimefire]

How long should powers like France and USA wait to form a bloc? It hampers building a formal empire in the beginning as infamy decay from running excess diplomacy is strong and it would likely be hard to generate mandate until you have some automatic members.

[@An_Economist_Plays]

At the same time, it just rips off the bandage at the start, deals with all the pain up front. In my next video, I do some aggressive bloc-building as France and show why it makes good sense to form a bloc from the beginning with France.
For the USA, it may be best to wait until it's got some strength so it can work at reducing infamy after taking the Mexican North and making it the USA's Southwest. There's also a question about it joining the UK's bloc and then getting strong enough to challenge it for leadership...

[@marcelm12plus3]

map mod?

[@zeugor7464]

Modern Political Map - Terrain Exterminator

[@marcelm12plus3]

@@zeugor7464 thx

[@An_Economist_Plays]

@@marcelm12plus3 steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3011614285