Market access mechanics of Victoria 3 explained

Market access is one of the metrics which is used in Victoria 3 to balance provinces. If you don’t have market access at 100% then you will probably have problems with the distribution of goods. In today’s article, we will look at what the problems with market access look like and what to do with them.

Market access mechanics explained

  • Market access shows how well is state connected to the market.
  • Lower than 100% could cause problems with price and shortages.
  • A long-term slump (up to 20%) will cause long-term problems in the state.
  • To increase you must use decree or build infrastructure.

Low market access

In a state with low market access usually are different prices of goods or shortages of goods. According to that, it’s important to have 100% market access. Your market access may drop below 100% and then it is good to start solving the problems…

Bohemia has problems with market access

… Because if your market access drops even more (for example down to 20%) you may not have enough resources in the state to solve the problem. In short it is a kind of death spiral that could eventually cause many problems if you don’t solve it in time.

First what to do if you see a problem with market access is to slow/stop construction in the state and start solving the problem, eventually increasing market access (as can be seen below).

Increasing market access

As I mentioned above, for increasing market access you must increase infrastructure. For increasing market access in a specific country exist two ways…

Province details with low infrastructure

the first one is with decree road maintenance which increases infrastructure by +25%. These decrees cost you 100 authority and provide a fast way by which you can increase market access.

How to apply decree to increase market access

The second way how to increase market access is to increase infrastructure. More about infrastructure is covered here... however, in case you don’t have much time for reading a whole article, there is a quick summary…

… the best thing which you can do is to build ports or a railway. So if you need to increase market access in seaside provinces then this should be a quick win – or you can change production methods in your ports as a fast solution.

If you aren’t seaside and you need to increase market access/infrastructure, then you must build a railway. This will increase +20 of your infrastructure and so increase market access.

Martin
I'm Martin, the main creator of this site. I love city builders, transport, and war strategy games. So I create this site to share my love with others! Let's make Tycoon games great again!