There honestly should be more rubber in Latin America, at least equal to what you added to SE Asia. It came from there and that region was dominant there during this time period. The rubber tree was later brought to Southeast Asia and became dominant leading up to the WW2 period only because of more profitable colonial exploitation and lack of competitiveness/investment in Latin American countries.

Rubber originally came from South America, but it was never produced in amounts that came even close to what the Asian producers did.
Once the global rubber industry was established, almost all the world's rubber was produced in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies until the Japanese captured them in WW2.
Sri Lanka and the Congo produced the rest, South America was irrelevant.

Brazil has enough rubber for an early rubber boom (and it starts with rubber already discovered in some states), but it can't match the production capacity of other states. Especially since its rubber is in states that likely don't have a lot of population anyway.

Yes but that is not due to realistic resource availability or the possible climate to produce rubber. That was due to colonial investment which is historical/modern data in our time line, correct?

The rubber's potential was never fully realized in South America due to a variety of factors such as political stability, investment, and it was more profitable for the colonial empires to exploit the SE Asian population.

None of this was guaranteed. Just a thought since it seems this mod is trying to strike a balance between total 100% sandbox and also total 100% historical railroading.

IDK if I am making any sense ?

They had their rubber boom but they didn't manage to produce anywhere near as much as a few islands in the East Indies could.

I don't mind giving SOME resources to places that for various reasons couldn't actually exploit them during the game's timeframe, but did have the potential to.

But when it comes to giving large amounts then I need some actual evidence that the state can really produce these large amounts.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3113637

There are a lot of reasons why it failed, mostly this was simply due to the rubber plantations in British colonies of Malaya due to "more efficient labor and land practices" IE meaning mass land confiscation from the natives and enslavement of the local population. Latin America's weaker state institutions (which did not have to be the case) were unable to invest in the needed infrastructure or "work force" to compete with global empire or de facto slavery.

Asia still makes roughly 90% of the world's rubber - also due to brutally cheap working conditions.

Latin America's lack of rubber production has less to do with the physical environment of the state, but rather how social/political factors played out - which again were not pre-determined.

It is, after all, harder to run brutal plantation-style economies in areas that are at least quasi-democratic.

https://www.bloomberglinea.com/2022/03/05/latin-americas-rubber-industry-looking-to-bounce-onto-the-world-stage/

^ article above touches on rubber industry coming back to Latin America due to a variety of factors: political stability, more competitive labor environment as Asia's average wages start to catch up with LatAm's, etc. Modern data isn't historical, but just an example.


Asia made 90% of the world's rubber due to a history of imperialism and colonial investment. The environments are the same or at least not the driving factors of the rubber boom.


Overall, just trying to make the point that it seems weird to apply the same logic as oil or iron to rubber, since the production capacity is not tied to what physical resources are present in the land, but more complicated and nuanced than that.

Also, from a gameplay perspective, allowing the British or some other European imperial power to control 90% of the world's rubber is not a recipe for a fun experience for the rest of the world or even for the player in control of it. So why not break up the monopoly a bit or at least allow it to form naturally rather than railroading geography because of history?

It's ironic that you would talk about "enslavement of the local population" when the British and Dutch abolished slavery much earlier than Brazil (who put a lot of effort into getting past the British blockade of the slave trade).

I never claimed that the environment of South America wasn't suitable for rubber plantations (obviously it is), or that this would be the only factor I consider for distributing resources.
In fact, I expressly consider other factors, such as economic viability and actual historical production.
Otherwise there would be several other resources, like tea or coffee, that would be spread much further around the world, because there are certainly more states that could theoretically grow these crops than actually did grow them.

I also do not agree with the gameplay argument. The game allows you to trade for resources that you don't have in your own country, and it costs fairly little (bureaucracy and convoys while bringing in tariff income and pop wages).
When I played as the Dutch East Indies, I considered it a fun experience to export rubber to all the world's industrial powers.

I don't think it's ironic at all actually. I don't think we want to assume that just because the British/Dutch or any other colonizer (see Belgium) outlawed "slavery" that their colonial holdings were anything other than a brutal, violent, "extraction industry at gunpoint" style of regime. Which explains the "economic viability" part right?

Wouldn't the choice to make the rubber potential on Asia so much bigger than in South America just be artificial historical railroading?

I live in Minas Gerais and I'm glad to see the representation of iron here (Hoi4 was weird about it) Maybe there is a middle path we can achieve?

This discussion surely is heathed already so you can choose to ignore me, but I do think it is a shortsighted choice to look at the Amazon and give it that little rubber.

The Amazon should have incredible impairments to building and infrastructure and disease + Incredible potential for resource extraction (although not arable land, cause arable land would mean deforestation potential that is harder in the amazons than in anywhere else in the planet) The Amazon is one of the 12 climatic systems of the planet, I would love to see forestation mechanincs being represented in-game, but while there are none I think its fair to pretend the Amazon as resources as much as iron from land are resources.

My mod's goal is to increase historical railroading.

Rubber is a late-game resource which is actually unlocked fairly early and is generally in use fairly early (there isn't much in the late-late game that would increase use of rubber).
That early peak of rubber is unfortunately completely ahistorical and is a balance issue with the game.

Here is world rubber production in 1913:
Brazil: 40 000
Other wild rubber: 23 000
Malaya: 33 000
Dutch East Indies: 5 000
Ceylon: 11 000
India: 1 000
British Borneo: 1 000

Now based on that you might think that South America should be able to build the most rubber plantations, however, this is misleading, because the rubber industry was expanding quickly at that point.

Here is world rubber production 15 years later in 1928:

Malaya 302 270
Dutch East Indies 229 630
Ceylon 56 900
Brazil 24 890
Sarawak 11 480
India 11 180
Indochina 10 160
British Borneo 6 600
Rest 7 110
Rest (wild) 3 770

The single state of Malaya alone outproduced all of Brazil by a factor of 12.

So when it comes to maximum potential, yes, Brazil and other Amazon states are decent, but they never got anywhere close to what the East Indies were able to produce when maxed out.

I can give a rubber throughput bonus to the Amazon Rainforest trait due to its suitable climate, but when it comes to maximum number of rubber plantations, those East Indies states need to have a big advantage.

@KAIKI DESHU: Your input is welcome. Text is a bad conveyor of tone and I don't mean to come off as heated, I just care about the subject and I am trying to have a good faith discussion with the author of the mod - a mod I think is very good so far which is why I am bothering talking about it at all! :)

@vflower: regarding your last two paragraphs, you are completely right that is how it turned out. I was just pointing out that there was nothing particular about Malaya which gave it that advantage than any other rubber producing area except for one thing: the massive investment and complete exploitation at the hands of the entire British Empire with the goal of turning the country into a glorified rubber plantation. This happened primarily due to the British not being allowed to do this in Latin American countries. However, I just ask this: Does this rubber potential in Malaya make any sense if a large empire never controls Malaya? What if the British in this timeline actually controls parts of the Amazon other than Guyana?

I understand you wanting to do some historical railroading, but I suppose my only point of consideration I would like to finally leave is that the Malayan rubber capacity is a *very specific* outcome resulting from a very specific chain of decisions and colonial exploitation that by no means was guaranteed.

You can make the same argument for goods like tea and coffee. What if those plantations were set up in other colonies?

Every situation is different and maybe in some cases the "what if" scenario could have played out exactly the same as real history, just in a different place.

But I would argue that in most cases, history developed the way it did because the outcome that ended up happening was the outcome that was most likely to be succesful.

In the case of rubber, British colonies in the Amazon would not have had the same production potential as Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. There simply isn't the same concentration of population and good soils there.

If you were in 1900 and could pick any place in the world to establish large-scale rubber plantations, which place would you pick?
My answer would be the exact Asian places where it happened in actual history. They have the right climate, good soils, lots of workers and well established colonial structures (unlike Africa).

@vflower:

"You can make the same argument for goods like tea and coffee. What if those plantations were set up in other colonies?"

I agree entirely. The Vic3 resource system is quite strange.... to fix or address it is almost tilting at windmills.