'There are a lot of things that factor into which interest groups and ideologies pops will support,' says Anward. Since interest groups rely on pop support, you might want to consider influencing your people to erode their base. But those are things you can fiddle with, conveniently. If the government and most prominent interest groups have a problem with it, you're going to struggle to improve things. You might want to pass some new laws-split into power structure, the economy and human rights-to ensure that workers are paid a decent wage and there's a strong support structure to help lift them up, but just like the miserable real world, making change is not a simple matter of enacting a bunch of nice new laws. Thankfully, you can make their lot in life a little better.

Despite the prosperity of the capitalists, those lower down the ladder are 'impoverished' and 'struggling', respectively. The 2,000 capitalists connected to the tooling workshops have an average annual wage of ВЈ21, but they also employ machinists, who only earn a quarter of that, and labourers, who earn even less. Here you can also see the economic disparity that exists in a capitalist society. In Prussia, the tooling workshops are run by German protestant capitalists, 600 of them, who also have 1,400 dependents-all of whom can be affected by your tweaking. So instead of looking at every individual tooling workshop, you get an overview of the lot of them. Like pops, businesses are grouped together. 'You are providing job opportunities for your population and taxing the economy to get your income.' 'So you're not, as a country, making money directly,' says Andersson. It still means you want to make sure they're all ticking along nicely, of course, because effective businesses can, in theory, pay higher wages, which you can then get a piece of downstream. Instead, you'll be relying on various taxes, depending on your economic system. 'The pops are the atoms of this simulation.' Mikael Andersson, lead designerД«usinesses will be crucial to an industrialised economy, but you won't be making cold, hard cash from them most of the time. Your economic system, naturally, opens and closes a lot of doors when it comes to earning you dosh. Communist countries, meanwhile, aren't that into private property, so the businesses will be state owned, giving you more direct control. If you're in a liberal democracy, you'll see a lot of privately owned businesses that will be managed by their owners. Your government and policies will also have a big impact on these buildings, too. Paradox describes Victoria 3 as a management game, and like a lot of management games you can expect to be up to your neck in buildings, which will in turn affect your economy, your capacity for trade and a whole host of other things. So in a conservative agrarian society, you probably won't have to worry about industrialists or trade unionists as much as you might in a more liberal nation. 'The interest groups gain their power from the pops, so without pop support the interest groups have no purpose at all really,' says Andersson.

The groups are only as influential as they are popular, however. Even when they're not the top dog, though, you'll still need to pay them heed and try to keep them happy-an ultimately Sisyphean task thanks to the fact that pretty much every choice you make will piss off somebody. These interest groups can be immensely powerful, especially when they're in government.

As ever, clicking on one thing takes you down the rabbit hole, making you dig deeper and deeper to find a solution to your problem, and at the same time revealing just how interconnected everything is. In this case, then, making changes that pleases monarchists will also create more support amongst the capitalists.

In the hands-off demo we're watching Prussia, where the head of the capitalists is very much pro-royal, and these leaders exert a great deal of influence over their block. A lot of capitalists are industrialists, naturally, who generally like low wages and screwing over pensioners, but others might be devoutly religious or staunch monarchists as well. There are also a variety of interest groups with different ideologies that people can belong to, beyond their pop designation. But capitalists are not a homogenous group. Just looking at their page reveals information about their literacy, how radical they are and how loyal they are, giving you an overview of how they're getting on. Maybe you've ruined the economy, and now you need to make the angry capitalists happy again.

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