Ok so I've only ever played this for like one day, and I cannot seem to play for more than two hours without absolutely tanking my economy.
I'm playing as Cuba, and obviously my goal is to liberate the Cuban people from the tyranny of the landowners and Catholic church and eventually establish communism.
I've watched a couple of "complete beginner" videos on the topic, but there's almost twenty "complete beginner" videos in this series and they're all like 40 minutes long lol. This game is insanely complicated.
I've played a lot of Tropico so I am not unfamiliar with "nation building" games, but this is of course way more complex. It only dawned on me recently that the reason that the plantations that I started with weren't making me any money because they're owned by the fucking ruling class and not the state.
So, any pointers? Early on in the game what should I be focusing on? What should I build, research, etc? I've established that I need to first start a construction industry (Cuba starts with none) and build some plantations in order to get some money flowing in, but after that I'm just kind of lost. Plus the Spanish empire seems to immediately gift me Puerto Rico for reasons unknown and it's a completely impoverished backwards starving hell hole, so then I have to deal with that hot mess too.
Thanks in advance Hexbears.
Going off the other comment, you want to industrialize as soon as you can, to improve profit margins and productivity. Early it can be a bit hard, but one way to make baby steps is by combining one tooling workshop with lumber sectors, which can take tools for more efficiency. The first version of construction sector uses lumber, which makes your economic growth cheaper. You can then use that to build other stuff that uses tools, to increase demand for them.
Eventually you’ll probably want iron to build tools more efficiently, and to get higher tier construction, but you want to make sure you have enough tool demand so that you don’t accidentally make tools too costly to produce with your new, low productivity, iron mine. You can deal with that either with a lot of things wanting tools, or a second tooling workshop you keep on wood tools.
Also you do get money from rich people owning stuff, through taxes. Doesn’t necessarily require government ownership to get money.
That said, if you have a foreign investor or someone you’re a puppet of, the people owning buildings might be in a different country, where you aren’t taxing them.