| Andy | Saturday, September 14, 2019 - 09:14 pm 
Following the last upgrade, some corporations produce a little more and are hiring proportionally more workers.
This results in a slow reduction of the number of corporations in all worlds.
we need to do so from time to time to keep the total number of corporations in Simcountry under some "soft" limit.
some databases can run out of control and the huge number of transactions can slow us down.
In the past weeks, the change was about 2%.
the total production per world remains unchanged.
Such changes as always, are very small and gradual and cause no harm, nor do they change the market situation.
I checked today and unfortunately, large shortages (too large) prevail. |
| John Galt | Saturday, September 14, 2019 - 09:52 pm
Small harmless changes... I don't think so. I had to close 850 oil corporations on LU from the last small change just to keep the oil market profitable for everyone else. I understand what you are trying to do, and I accept the change, which is why I built 850 new corporations in various other sectors to replace the things I closed down.
Andy, the way the market in this game is designed requires that massive shortages must exist. Every product has a minimum price and a maximum price. When a product is in surplus, it ticks down a notch toward the minimum price and when it is in shortage, it ticks up a notch toward maximum price. All products in this game are only profitable when they are at or near the maximum price. A large percentage of the corporations in this game are owned by C3 countries. C3 countries close corporations that are not profitable and try to open new corporations in sectors that are in shortage. The moment a product enters surplus and the price ticks down enough notches so that it is no longer profitable, C3s start massively closing their corporations. The result of this is shortage. Then when the shortage causes the price to rise, C3s start rebuilding the corporations they just closed down. This is why every product in this game has very predictable boom/bust cycles. The natural state of this game is shortage, otherwise no one can make money on any product. If corporations were still profitable when in surplus, I think you would start seeing more products enter and stay in surplus. The way things are right now, no one wants surpluses. Not the players and not the C3s, and people will actively manipulate the markets to ensure that things never come into surplus for long. |
| Letsie | Saturday, September 14, 2019 - 10:16 pm
If you are interested in another example of the boom/bust cycle, just look at the defensive weapon maintenance. It really underlines john galts point.
When the DWM weren't in the red I made 0 profit with them. They were fully upgraded, ceo owned corps with a salary of 350 and they ran about 0.7-1.4B loss per game month per corp. Now that the supply is in the red I am earning money on them again. |
| John Galt | Saturday, September 14, 2019 - 10:34 pm
Thank you Letsie. You are also a very strong Econ player so I knew you would completely understand what I am saying. Trying to end shortages in this game is impossible without completely changing the way the market works. The best we can accomplish is keeping the shortages small enough so that you never have to wait more than 1 or 2 game months to get your product. The key word is keeping the product in shortage though so that it is profitable still. I would say that most products are at that point already. The ones in massive shortage also have massive production, so it's not long before your order gets filled since it is first come first serve. |
| Andy | Sunday, September 15, 2019 - 12:27 am
John,
there was no need to close 850 corporations.
C3s close corporations very quickly and stabilize the market.
this is by design.
I see the number of oil corporations increasing.
If there is an oil oversupply, it takes some time before the corporations start losing money. Then many are closed and soon enough the situation goes back to normal.
it is cheaper than closing then and start again with new corporations, upgrading them etc.
I think that oil is now short, so are other products that were in oversupply recently. |
| Andy | Sunday, September 15, 2019 - 12:36 am
It is true that large shortages are better than large oversupply.
However, we had shortages that left many corporations with very low production due to lack of supplies. Thousands of corporations produced nothing.
this can destroy the market very quickly and cause 50% of corporations to close in a day.
We have no way of getting them back quickly. It could take weeks and require manual addition of products.
we have measures against it.
we call them interventions and they are automatic.
If a shortage becomes absurdly high, then 10% of the shortage is added to the market. Only a small number of essential products are treated like this.
The number of interventions rose very high a month ago. It is back to normal.
we can add products to the list but are very reluctant to do so.
I explained interventions here many times in the past. |
| John Galt | Sunday, September 15, 2019 - 05:52 am
Andy I had over 50% of LU oil production. Around 2000 corps total. There werent enough c3 corps to reasonably close to end the surplus. I had to take action. Its not something I would do needlessly as it was extremely expensive for me to do but it had to be done. |
| Andy | Sunday, September 15, 2019 - 01:25 pm
You could also not close any of them and see what the market does. Maybe some would be closed but obvious not so many as we now see new oil corporations being created. |
| John Galt | Sunday, September 15, 2019 - 02:05 pm
I dont anticipate much new oil creation on LU. 3000 corps seems to be the sweet spot now. Was around 5000 before that. Oil crashed hard because demand for oil dropped massively due to all the electric power closures. Electric power has stabilized now so oil demand has held steady. |
| Letsie | Monday, September 16, 2019 - 08:59 am
With all due respect but I am going to steer this discussion back to the real problem, corporations do not make much or any profit when there is not a shortage on the market.
If you want to see another example of the boom/bust cycle take a look at my country Lets A.
When the markets for services are deep in the red I earn around 320B per game month after all the expanses have been paid.
When the service markets are in the green I earn around 180B. That is a HUGE drop.
There is just an enormous gap between the lowest and highest prices being paid for a product. And if you do not get a price somewhere in the top 70% your corporation is not going to be profitable. |
| johnV | Monday, September 16, 2019 - 03:14 pm
I have two examples from WG that I would like to share.
Someone dumped 2B electric creating a huge surplus. At he current production rate it will take several years to get to a shortage. It will then take several more years before the price recovers to a profitable level.
Chemicals were in surplus for a while and the price hit bottom. When it went into shortage it took a while for the corps to become profitable again.
During this time corps were closing even though there was a shortage.
I believe part of the problem is the slow linear change in price, as the supply changes. If there is a huge surplus the price should plummet and skyrocket on a big shortage. I think this would cause corps to close sooner and keep corps from closing in a shortage. |
| John Galt | Monday, September 16, 2019 - 04:49 pm
Someone dumped 3 billion electric on FB also haha. I am pretty sure it is rhou69919 because his finance page is showing huge amounts of materials sold every month.
Edit: Just looked at WG and his CEO is also showing large materials sold every month. Definitely him. Wonder why he is dumping so much. |
| Andy | Tuesday, September 17, 2019 - 06:15 pm
I see many more products with shortages than ones with over supply.
Having shortages in all products, always, makes it a little simple.
I hope for a dynamic market, with surprises but at the end, it depends on players.
sudden dumping or buying, causes a local shortage but there is very often a followup effect on other products, shortages cause other shortages and oversupply causes closings and then other shortages.
this is more interesting than a stable predictable markets. |
| Lord Mndz | Tuesday, September 17, 2019 - 08:53 pm
Andy, would you consider adding more ways how to trade goods? I mean improving trade strategies page with selling strategy and also adding price, not only amount and quality.
That would be interesting to have and this would allow to stabilize markets much more by players themselves, setting buy/sale strategies. |
| evader23 | Tuesday, September 17, 2019 - 09:57 pm
Question on Over/shortage if there is a massive shortage do c3's build to compasate for that I would think the goeal here a in real world if demand for widgets is 1000 there shold be 1000 produced
Thoughts? |
| John Galt | Wednesday, September 18, 2019 - 12:26 am
Evader, C3s do respond to market conditions and will close companies in surplus and open new ones in shortage. |
| evader23 | Wednesday, September 18, 2019 - 12:27 am
Thanks John |
| Johanas Bilderberg | Wednesday, September 18, 2019 - 12:55 pm
Market shortages make the game more realistic.
I agree the trade strategy page could use a few tweaks as well.
Perhaps an option that changes price based on supply. High setting for market deficit and a low setting for market surplus.
That might help with the cycles in the market. |
| John Galt | Wednesday, September 18, 2019 - 02:27 pm
Trade strategies right now dont do anything. Everyone buys at market price no matter what. I couldnt find any differences in the testing I have done. |
| Andy | Wednesday, September 18, 2019 - 04:48 pm
The priority of building corporations in general, depends on the size of the shortage.
the product showing the largest shortage in terms of number of corporations needed, will be served first.
meaning, C3s will build these corporations if they have the manpower. |
| Andy | Wednesday, September 18, 2019 - 04:50 pm
In my experience, sell strategies do work.
setting the numbers correctly could be tricky. |
| Letsie | Friday, September 20, 2019 - 11:03 am
Sell strategies definitely work. |
| John Galt | Friday, September 20, 2019 - 01:16 pm
Set a corporation with sell strategy and one with best strategy. They always seem to sell at same price on market from the testing I have done
I’ll test it again of course to be sure. I may be wrong. |
| Andy | Friday, September 20, 2019 - 03:11 pm
Thew parameters you set are included in each transaction.
some times it has more or less effect, depending on what the buyers what to pay.
sell strategies in general, do not guarantee anything.
purchasing strategies, if you offer more than market price, are more likely to be followed. |
| Letsie | Friday, September 20, 2019 - 06:48 pm
John can I give you a setting to try?
Sell 200, drop 1 per month
Sell 100 drop 10 per month
It is a bit of an extreme example but if you do this with a product that is deep in the red with 2 corps that are fully upgraded you can see a difference in income over a longer period of time. |
| Rkessinger | Friday, September 20, 2019 - 09:24 pm
I just hold all production when my corps are manufacturing a good in surplus and sell it when the market is better.
Even if I temporarily lose a few tens of billions in the short run, you're making over twice as much money selling at max price vs. min price. |
| Rkessinger | Friday, September 20, 2019 - 09:28 pm
Also reduce cost of production by stocking supply level for a number of months greater than the time in between boom and bust cycles for a given product every time it hits a price floor.
I.e. factory maintenance hit a price floor last week, so stock every corporation for 10 years during that floor and you've made yourself way more profitable over time |
| Letsie | Saturday, September 21, 2019 - 11:52 pm
Yeah that seems like a good idea. I am just to lazy to keep track of those things but if you have the time and energy for it it sure would be smart to do. |
| John Galt | Monday, September 30, 2019 - 01:19 pm
Hey Letsie, so I decided to try the strategies again. I set my sale price to 120% and decrease by 5% (with follow quality on of course), and I noticed a 1.5% increase in sale price. I'm not sure how that happened since I am doing increments of 5, but hey you were right, the strategies seem to have some effect. I have increased my sale price to 150% now to see what happens with that. I haven't committed to a final number yet, but I will definitely be using trade strategies now. Thanks for the tip Letsie. We need to make you the minister of finance for LDI  |
| John Galt | Wednesday, October 2, 2019 - 12:02 am
I take it back about trade strategies. They are most definitely broken. Some of my corps are selling at lower than market price despite massive shortages. They were selling for higher on best price setting. Others sell slightly higher, but never more than 2% regardless of the numbers I use. It seems to be a crap shoot. I am going back to best price. |
| Lord Mndz | Wednesday, October 2, 2019 - 05:26 am
Hi John, i really support what you are testing with trade strategies. They used to work in a very different way than today, playing with them was one of most interesting things in the game. I think you need to open new topic under the bugs section and continue working on this bug so w3c would have enough information to fix it.
When i came back to the game i the same day noticed that these are not working as they should and numbers you set has no impact to the price you are selling at. It was very big dissapointment to expierence this... |
| Letsie | Wednesday, October 2, 2019 - 04:29 pm
I have to disagree with the both of you. Perhaps it does not do as much as the numbers indicate but my experiences with the trade strategies are definitively different.
I am going to use the LU defensive weapon maintenance corps market for my example. When there is a large shortage they run about 1.4-1.7B profit per corp. When there is a surplus as there has been for the last couple of days they lose 1.5-2.0B per month. This big difference in profits makes them a decent candidate to run some tests with.
Both the corporations that I am going to compare are fully upgraded. Their welfare index is only 0.1 apart. Which is not exactly the same but I thought it would be small enough.
My sale strategies are:
For corp 1
200% increase drop 1 per month
For corp 2
best price
Average profit over the last 10 months:
Corp 1
-1.7B per game month
Corp 2
0.4B profit
Stock left for sale
Corp 1
754.562 units
Corp 2
0
I am going to scale this up a bit and do 5 corps with best price sale and 5 corps with 200/1 sale strategy. To me this very small sample size shows the basic difference between the 2. The best price one will do its best to sell its goods even it means accepting a slightly lower price. The other one is simply not selling everything. I will report back in a couple of days after increasing my sample size.
What I am about to write has no basis in numbers but is just general observations.
The def weapons market has huge ups and downs. Now that there is a surplus my corps with the 200/1 (which is my normal setting for these corps) are keeping most of their goods in stock. Once the goods that have been dumped on the market have been sold they start selling of their stock and I earn a LOT of money. For now the 1 corp that I had set to best price selling has sold of its stock and accepted a lower profit.
I do not know if the trade strategies only work for markets with big swings or if there is something els. But I honestly believe they at least do something. |
| John Galt | Wednesday, October 2, 2019 - 04:46 pm
I was not going by the profits. I was looking at the actual purchase and sale logs of the corporations. They show exactly what price transactions occurred in. Some corps were slightly higher and some slightly lower and I could not correlate it to any specific market conditions. The differences were all within 2% of the market price. |
| John Galt | Wednesday, October 2, 2019 - 08:23 pm
One possible explanation is that maybe C3s only use best price for their purchase orders and that since the majority of purchases are from C3s then it could potentially explain why nothing seems to sell for much higher than 1 or 2 percentage points from market price. |
| Lord Mndz | Thursday, October 3, 2019 - 05:27 am
I don't believe c3s had been buying differently in the past and still i used to sell at much higher prices than 1-2%. It used to depend on market situation a lot. My guess is that this is related with some hard limit of price and changes in max quality. The max quality in the past was 220, and i was able to sell +100% on top of that, but when Ceo quality was raised to 330, nobody raised the selling limit accordingly. |
| John Galt | Thursday, October 3, 2019 - 01:43 pm
Interesting. You might be right. 330Q product only sells for around 2.96 times the base price. Maybe there is a hard limit. |
| Lord Mndz | Thursday, October 3, 2019 - 05:48 pm
Andy, it would be interesting to hear your opinion on this. |
| Andy | Thursday, October 3, 2019 - 06:34 pm
There is no change in the way the products market works.
Not in a very long time.
It is hard to figure out exactly what happens and the main reason is that the trading depends on what you offer but equally, on what is available on the other side.
You are not selling to the gamemaster. You are selling to a country or a corporation with their own strategies and these vary from minute to minute depending on what is already processed and what remains on the market.
and then of course the pricing trends that depend on the total quantities of product offered and requested against market price. These determine the direction of the price movements.
Fixed price offers and requests could cause price changes and are easy to manipulate so we are not taking them into account in the totals to decide on the direction of the price.
The market maker in the trading process is trying to match an order with an offer. Many times, there are differences of pricing even in the ones closest to each other and the market maker must create a match or we will sit there with nothing being traded.
There are more factors, mainly quality that make this very complex.
all this makes it very hard to predict what will happen. |
| Lord Mndz | Thursday, October 3, 2019 - 07:45 pm
Fair enough, and still do we have hard limit in these calculations? |
| Letsie | Friday, October 4, 2019 - 12:09 pm
I would like to post a follow up on my previous message. The def weapon market is negative again and right now I am seeing a large difference in sales between the same 2 corps that I wrote about in my previous post.
The first 1
Sale strategy 200% drop 1 per month
9.8B profit (it is now selling of its stock that wasnt sold during the green market conditions)
The 2nd one
Best price sale
0.8B profit
The first one is following a different sale pattern. I understand what the both of your wrote and that is why I will try out these settings with 5 vs 5 corps. For now I am convinced that the sale strategies at least do something |
| John Galt | Friday, October 4, 2019 - 04:32 pm
Check the sale logs for the prices. Profit is not an accurate measure because sometimes their produced quality varies a few points due to fluctuations in supply quality. |
| Letsie | Friday, October 4, 2019 - 06:39 pm
The 200% corp sold around 255 quality products at 72297 per unit. Over a period of 6 months there were some small deviations from this but overal it stayed around that price and quality.
The best price corp sold around 255 quality products at 55395 per unit in the same 6 month period.
I would like to point out that the market conditions are changing and that def maintenence is once again a red market with significant shortages. This is turning into something that I find most interesting. This is of course a very small sample size so I am going to take 5 corporations of each and keep on checking on them. If you are interested I could post the logs here so you can compare them. |
| Letsie | Friday, October 4, 2019 - 06:41 pm
As for the suply settings. I buy my supllies at 180 with a 12/24 setting. |
| John Galt | Friday, October 4, 2019 - 08:48 pm
Yes I am definitely interested. Would love to see your findings.
I am doing a 200% test myself on a services Corp since it is always in massive shortage. Should be prime candidate to fetch a high price. |
| Andy | Saturday, October 5, 2019 - 01:57 pm
Interesting to see but hard to conclude anything.
Don't forget the dumping of products, taking place all the time and distorting the market. Same with hoarding that we see in many countries and enterprises.
Immediate buying is an issue too.
There are limitations that can kick in, both on the price and the quality. The trading algorithm gets into a tight corner when it meets large quality differences and must make a trade.
It is more complex, with thinly traded products where it is harder to find a good match. |
| John Galt | Saturday, October 5, 2019 - 04:32 pm
Andy is quality considered at all when matching trade partners? I produce around 290 quality and Letsie around 225. More people buy at that level than at my level. Could that account for why he is getting higher prices from his trade strategies?
I assumed quality does not matter for filling orders and that if I sell 330q and you buy 120q, the game pays me the difference. |
| Lord Mndz | Saturday, October 5, 2019 - 05:16 pm
I think John is right, i also have the same conclusion. Otherwise it would be too complex to match all orders. |
| Letsie | Saturday, October 5, 2019 - 10:54 pm
John Galt I do not think the service corps are a good market for this example. Exactly for the reasons you described. It is a market with almost 0 fluctuations.
That theory sounds interesting. Maybe that is why I get the occasional spikes when the market goes from green to red. |
| johnV | Tuesday, October 8, 2019 - 02:16 pm
Letsie, what you said about not selling in surplus and making up for it in shortage caught my eye. A lot of products on WG have short demand periods, some with the price hovering around the break even point.
At best price my Chemical corps were either loosing or barely making money. They have improved using +200 -1.
Another product I tried has it's price in the top quarter of it's price range. There was little or no difference between best, +100, +200, so the max limit is hard.
I think the monthly production demand controls whether or not it sells not the overall supply. Best price sales are done first, then contracts. If there is still demand the high price stock sells. |
| Vladian Enache | Tuesday, October 8, 2019 - 09:28 pm
strategies do not work
nothing will sell over quality price, ever, no matter the shortage or buy orders
check my thread in problems forum |
| Andy | Wednesday, October 9, 2019 - 08:41 am
Quality is taken into account but what you see is the result of the trading procedure trying to find a match.
The request and ask prices are multiplied by the quality.
It is not available in most cases and a match is made by shifting both request and offer a bit.
When the difference is large, there is just no trade.
This is true for all offers and requests at a set price.
market price trades always go except for large shortages or over supply.
I answered the questions in the problem forum.
as I said there, you can ask for a price, but there need to be someone who wants to purchase at that price.
The trading is not easy to see through.
we get many questions about trade, which is fine, but the trading system works correctly for years and did not change at all recently.
Market conditions are currently difficult and there is a transaction backlog in many products. |
