Victoria 3 is a strategic society simulator where you need to build the ideal society during the period of the 19th century. As you create the society of your dreams, you will need to balance the demands of various economic groups and lead your nation towards stability. The game gives you complete freedom on how you wish to develop your country and extend your influence either diplomatically or militarily as you try to maintain global peace and avoid conflicts.
Trade is an important part of establishing relationships with other countries as well as fulfilling the needs and desires of your citizens. In order to establish trade, you will need to use diplomacy and forge trade agreements with other nations.
This guide will tell you everything you need to know about trade in the game.
Trade Agreements Guide – Victoria 3
In order to conduct trade with other nations in the game, you will need to establish trade routes which can be used to import or export goods from one country to another.
You can check the current and potential trade routes for your country by accessing the trade routes menu. It will show you the estimated revenue or amount of trade that you can expect and how it will affect the markets in your country.
Goods can be imported or exported by creating a new trade route by clicking on the New Import Route or New Export Route buttons.
This means that if the markets in your country are unable to produce a commodity such as food then you can import the deficit from another nation.
You can use the trade screen to check what goods you are short on and by how much.
Similarly, you can also the screen to check what goods are being overproduced in your market and then export them to gain a profit.
However it is important to note that establishing trade routes isn’t free as you will need to use your bureaucracy and if your country doesn’t have a land connection between each other, it will require convoys.
These trade routes are also subject to international diplomacy and this means that you cannot import important commodities such as food and weapons supplies from nations that are placed under an embargo or ones that are hostile towards you.
It can take some time to establish a trade route and each route starts at level 1 meaning that it moves a low volume of goods initially.
The level of the route and the number of goods that it can transport will gradually increase once the route becomes profitable and decrease if it is losing money.
Trade centres which are the main development buildings for establishing trade routes will be automatically created and destroyed in proportion to the amount of trade that you facilitate via the trade network.
Irrespective of whether you are importing or exporting goods, you are very likely to earn profits from trade routes by imposing tariffs.
However since tariffs are a kind of tax imposed on your people, they won’t make you richer and just shift the burden elsewhere.
For facilitating trade routes, you will need to ensure that your markets are accessible by using the Market Access feature. Each country will have a market access rating that is at 100% by default which means that your markets are functioning normally.
However, you will need to maintain your infrastructure by creating or upgrading them to ensure that Market Access remains at 100% otherwise you will be losing some of your exported or imported goods.
If the total infrastructure usage exceeds the amount of infrastructure available then the state’s economy will suffer penalties in proportion to how overused the infrastructure is.
To increase market access in coastal states, you can build ports or railroads in states with plenty of land.
That’s it, now go ahead and establish trade routes with other countries to prosper your economy!
