| Johanas Bilderberg | Sunday, March 27, 2022 - 04:02 pm 
Babying defensive weapons maintenance weapons corporations on LU is becoming tiresome.
Can you look into the supply situation before they all go bankrupt?
Thank you. |
| rob72966 | Sunday, March 27, 2022 - 07:01 pm
A big problem is the over ordering of supplies when the market is low. If not micro managed the corps / countries go into debt and then bankruptcy occurs. Now corps and countries just keep re ordering each month until the supplies come in. Allow us to put in a max order stop. Example order (no more than 40 months of supplies per corp / Country.) I think this is why so many new players walk away from the game.
Rob |
| T M | Sunday, March 27, 2022 - 08:57 pm
I don't think Rob and Johanas are talking about the same issue. But I too have been babying the weapons/airforce maintenance for some time. This lag is 3 years of supplies and basically you can't get weapons for regular price unless you make them yourself. It gets to the point where they wait so long the orders are changed to immediate. The cash situation is untenable then because they need billions to fill the orders. They need to be able to buy market priced products within a reasonable time. |
| Lord Mndz | Sunday, March 27, 2022 - 10:09 pm
there is a good side of this - weapons market is growing and players simply are not utilizing it fully yet. when due to natural resources update mining market was closed/limited game lacked other options, so now all military maintenance and weapons corporations are really good. we just need to work together and build more corporations that are mostly needed to improve the supply.
if countries and corporations are ordering without a limit then this is a bug clearly. could it be that additional orders are added when materials get negative value in stock? |
| Hern | Monday, March 28, 2022 - 08:34 pm
If partial contracts were possible, the babying would be far reduced thanks to Common Markets. As it is, I have to check once a day to replace all orders with immediate orders. The profits are worth it, I suppose. |
| Banedon Runestar | Tuesday, March 29, 2022 - 07:07 pm
I'm on KB, and having similar issues with all of the various Maintenance industries.
The only way to get Offense, Defense, Airforce, and Military Base Maintenance units for my nations is by using Buy Immediate. This has a tendency, especially with Military Base Maint, to suck up my entire spending cap for the month.
A similar issue with with Asset Maintenance. Everything on KB that uses Asset Maint is constantly running short of it. Between having to regularly use Buy Immediate to obtain Asset Maint units, and production stoppages when those materials are missing, my Road, Rail, and Water Treatment Maint corps can't make money.
I have managed to acquire a number or Asset Maint corps, to try to fix my issues, but they are constantly running short of materials to actually build "Asset Maintenance" units. I can't obtain Cargo Shuttles at all for my Asset Maint companies. Between having to regularly use Buy Immediate to obtain Cargo Shuttles, and production stoppages when those materials are missing, Asset Maint corps can't make money.
And folks that are far more knowledgeable than I have stated elsewhere that Cargo Shuttles simply cannot be built profitably, so no one makes those corps.
As possible solutions:
1. Can Military Base Maint be redone so that the cost per unit is similar to the other Maint types? That way the existing spending space isn't completely taken up when I have to use Buy Immediate?
2a. Can Cargo Shuttles be redone so that they can be built and sold for a profit?
2b. Can Cargo Shuttles be removed as an input from Asset Maint entirely?
Regards,
Banedon Runestar
President
Etar |
| Jiggle Billy | Tuesday, March 29, 2022 - 09:03 pm
The fastest and most lasting impact on this is making all corps use supplies in whole numbers or allowing less than monthly contracts. Currently if you contract to your own corps its a minimum of one unit per month, many corps use less than a unit monthly.
I feel adding custom contract that are manually scheduled could add in interesting factor to the game, though would benefit experienced players over new players |
| T M | Wednesday, March 30, 2022 - 12:08 pm
The Maintenance companies for weapons in my country, (Bella Donna WG) like
Osanko Airforce Maintenance, have orders stacked up for over 10 years without getting filled. This corp has years worth of orders for over 10 products at the moment on order. Yet I still have to hit fill immediately every so often to get the products so the company can actually make some money. When it is making money, the corp is great, but the fact of the matter is it needs to keep 7+ years worth of supplies on hand so that it can wait to get its orders filled. This means the corps has hundreds of billions of dollars worth of supplies. I have had to transfer billions to the corps too. Early on they were in threat of closing with 200 billion in loans because I didn't go back through and cancel the stacked orders (click 7+ times to get to 1-2 orders only for 10 + products!) This isn't how I want to spend my time on this game, and it is not sustainable. I would keep these companies going if I didn't have to do so much work for them, but I'm at the point now of closing mine.
TM |
| Johanas Bilderberg | Wednesday, March 30, 2022 - 01:58 pm
Same.
I have shut down 35 so far as they fall behind/accumulate loans.
The spending limit for corporations limits how many I can save. |
| johnV | Wednesday, March 30, 2022 - 02:29 pm
TM, as you said there are two problems being discussed.
About the demand for country needed maintenance products, I'll repeat what I've said before. Quality for all products should matter.
Look at country consumed Construction, the higher the quality the less you use, while with the other country consumables you just pay more for the higher quality.
If the formula used for construction was used for all the country products there would be less demand, incentive for presidents to manufacture and sell to themselves. This would free up space for other corps and make countries more profitable.
Also, if corps produce in fractional amounts and other corps demand in fractional amounts you should be able to contract fractional amounts.
The other problem is the stacking of orders. If an order can't be filled it makes no sense for corps to place more orders that won't be filled. |
| Hern | Thursday, March 31, 2022 - 12:20 am
TM, use the orders page to toggle many orders at once. It will save you so much time.
Banedon, I find cargo shuttles to be extremely lucrative. The one problem, from an enterprise perspective, is tax rates. If you own the residing country though, then it becomes a moot point. |
| Mike C | Friday, April 1, 2022 - 05:31 am
I'm seeing a problem with auto ordering for Weapon Quality Upgrades corporations as well. They regularly order products they don't use: Airforce, Off Weapons, and Str Weapons maintenance. They use 0 per month, have 0 in stock, but still requesting order after order. |
| Johanas Bilderberg | Thursday, April 7, 2022 - 03:16 am
I started a 3rd CEO just to build cargo shuttles and defensive weapons for my DWM corporations. |
| Andy | Wednesday, April 13, 2022 - 10:19 am
The shortages in some products and in maintenance products are too large.
We hoped that players will jump into it and produce more.
simply adding products is trivializing the market process.
As all corporations become larger, we expect these maintenance corporations to grow, short term, by 5% to 10%.
Their profitability will improve and we will make it significant.
We hope that when these corporations produce more and become even more profitable, players will build more of them and start reducing the absurd shortages. |
| Jiggle Billy | Wednesday, April 13, 2022 - 12:54 pm
Andy, they are almost impossible to keep running without contracting supplies, and for most maintenance corps the supplies are fractional so you can not run fixed contracts.
Running maintenance corps is all clicking, maintaining them supplied must be done manually for all but defensive weapons and even there still requires every couple day manual intervention.
Either the contract system must improve to allow fractional or less frequent contracts (maybe an option to custom organize contracts) or the maintenance corps need to start using supplies in whole number increments. |
| Johanas Bilderberg | Wednesday, April 13, 2022 - 01:40 pm
Agreed.
Seems like a simple fix |
| JOEL | Wednesday, April 13, 2022 - 02:34 pm
Juggle is right several players myself included have attempted to jump on these shortages. However there isn't enough contracting in the world to help out unless there's a global effort to build defense weapons corps |
| JOEL | Wednesday, April 13, 2022 - 02:35 pm
Jiggle is right several players myself included have attempted to jump on these shortages. However there isn't enough contracting in the world to help out unless there's a global effort to build defense weapons corps |
| Andy | Wednesday, April 13, 2022 - 04:34 pm
The problem must be resolved and it will.
Resolving it should be done by increasing supplies, not by changes to the game.
We have already increased production a bit.
The next update will include a further increase in the output of the maintenance corporations.
there will be a decline in the cost of defensive weapons maintenance that will help reduce the cost of the defensive army.
The increased production will improve the profitability while the number of people working in these corporations keeps increasing gradually. |
| T M | Thursday, April 14, 2022 - 02:45 am
The problem won't be solved by increasing production of weapons corps until the point where the shortages aren't years long and the corporations can fill orders without having to make immediate orders at double the price. The other issue is that these corps have a huge list of very expensive weapons to buy. The list of weapons makes little sense with 25 of this type and 1 of another. The supply needed numbers are random. On top of that there are simply too many of them. the companies should be divided into smaller companiues so they don't have so many things they have to buy. They frequently run out of money and have to either load up on loans or get a state bail out because they have 10 different weapons to buy. I disagree that simply building weapons is the way out of this problem. Tweak how many weapons they need, divide them, and make them able to contract on the fraction is the better solution. |
| Jiggle Billy | Thursday, April 14, 2022 - 03:55 pm
The shortage in maintenance corps is driven by the shortages in their supplies. But if the supplies go into surplus they very quickly go into losses making them risky to run unless the shortages are extreme.
Just one short supply for a maintenance corps, as is typical for assets maintenance, stops all production. Yet supplying that one material to yourself is difficult to contract to the corp as the usage is fractional, and risky to do on market scale as when it does go surplus the corps go to massive losses rapidly. |
| Andy | Thursday, April 14, 2022 - 04:49 pm
Nobody is about to become less profitable.
Supplies are not going into a surplus unless players increase production very substantially.
If you know the numbers, you will see that shortages in some products are declining.
Increasing the output of the maintenance corporations will surly reduce the shortages.
we have seen this before and it was resolved.
it will be resolved now.
The only issue is that we do not want to magically resolve shortages.
Players should do that and we should not intervene.
Now, shortages in several products are so high, it is unlikely players will resolve them, and they did not for a prolonged period.
A fix requires a structural increase in the output of some of these products but not in a way that will flip into a surplus.
we will watch what happens and you can too.
we expect some progress in the coming days but we might need more increases in the output. |
| Johanas Bilderberg | Saturday, April 23, 2022 - 03:18 pm
New update.
I am just allowing them to go bankrupt and paying off the debt.
The reasons are simple fixes.
Allow us to shut down failing corporations without an additional penalty.
Create a simple way to determine what orders relate to materials in shortage without multiple back and forth checks.
Then we can quickly update orders to immediate to stop the bleeding.
Change the supplies needed for maintenance corps to full amounts instead of partial so contracts work correctly.
I have started a new armaments CEO and am working to fix the issue but the problem just keeps getting worse.
Thanks Andy. |
| Andy | Saturday, April 23, 2022 - 03:32 pm
Shortages continue but they are less severe than before.
we will see where it goes from here.
The number of immediate orders needed is much smaller.
The orders tab on the corporations page shows all the outstanding orders, in all corporations, that could not be executed because of shortages.
You can replace them by immediate orders, all at once.
the supplies for the maintenance corporations are sometimes big items.
you cannot require 12.
there are now more supplies available, shortages of these products are lower and production levels are increasing.
corporation debts must be paid when they close. There is no additional penalty.
Otherwise, as you well know, it would be a great way to make a lot of money.
take money out, gat loans, more money out, then close the corporations.
We have been there before. |
| Andy | Saturday, April 23, 2022 - 03:37 pm
Johanas,
All this reasoning is based on a strange case of severe shortages in some products.
You do not start making big changes because of a case you don't like.
I hope for everyone that shortages will continue.
if we get surpluses instead, everyone starts shouting as product prices go down and corporations will make losses.
Surpluses, losses and a massive loss of corporations will make everyone poorer.
What exactly do you hope for. |
| Lord Mndz | Sunday, April 24, 2022 - 08:06 am
Andy,
something is terribly wrong with the weapons maintenance corporations. Majority of them are having crazy big debt and closing down in hundreds..
please check:
1. conditions to close corporations. Majority of them have high value of materials, much higher than debt and still closing. Only looking into cash is wrong.
2. Profits should not be transfered to CEO or Country while corporation has debt, otherwise it will be impossible to compensate high value purchase of supplies which always uses loan, as corporations are not keeping enough of cash.
3. CEO conditions must be improved, I lost 200T in few days because if this change not counting hundreds of closed corporations. I will close my CEO account if this is not fixed, what a shame that should be.
 |
| Lord Mndz | Sunday, April 24, 2022 - 08:16 am
btw - WHY I cannot log in to CEO account when it has negative cash????I could fix that when logging, there is possible to move cash from corporations etc. but game does not allow that???
below is just example of how bad the situation is... I really expect moved from W3C to fix it and possible to compensation as well
 |
| Andy | Sunday, April 24, 2022 - 10:08 am
I think you are proving my point about huge enterprises.
the limit is 750.
Larger is very hard to manage.
Corporation closings happen all the time.
In this case, lack of supplies caused production to stop and after some time, when production is at zero levels, corporations close.
the numbers by the way are not huge.
it happens many times.
Huge enterprise must be managed nearly daily, cash transfers and immediate orders and you could prevent this.
on such a scale, it is easy to quickly go into negative cash and loans.
You can login and transfer money into the enterprise.
either from your account or from any other country and resolve the cash problem.
The max negative cash level is hardly ever reached.
it is the huge size of the enterprise that requires a limit of probably 150 trillions to be on the safe side. |
| Andy | Sunday, April 24, 2022 - 10:14 am
I looked into it.
Many corporations do not have the workers they need and are at 5% production.
Many others have very high debt and a warning about pending closure.
we have just several says ago, in the last upgrade, increased the cash levels before automatic transfers and increased, significantly the amount of loans corporations can take.
this is done because of the increasing size of corporations.
I also saw that you have transferred money into the enterprise but you need to resolve the debt issue in many of the corporations. |
| Lord Mndz | Sunday, April 24, 2022 - 11:09 am
Andy,
the size of ceo never was a problem, it used to be just fine for year. but currently situation is not managable. corporations had not been closing as money transfer from ceo helped to survive hard times.
now ceo is just losing money all the time, despite that my profit always shows 2,5-3T.
hiring is %5, because i use auto hiring option to decrease it when production is not solved or during lack or supplies. keeping 100% at all times makes no sense.
my corporations have huge stock of materials, usually up to 60 months, that reduces the need of immediate offers to be done manually.
something needs to be done, you better see how to solve this.
if this is my inability to run this big ceo, why only weapon/assets maintenance corporations are closing? something is wrong with their balance. |
| Lord Mndz | Sunday, April 24, 2022 - 11:24 am
I think the main disbalance is in buying supplies/minimal cash levels. these maintenance corporations are using insane amounts of materials, so if regular material cost is 20b per month, buying for 15 months is 300B, while cash level is much lower. I just checked few corporations and they were fine until buying of materials then immediatly after started showing risk of closing due to high debt. after buying materials corporations got 250b loans.
cash level should be minimal as 1 year worth of cost of materials
also closing conditions should include check of value of materials, it does not make sense to close corporation when it has 500b materials and 200B debt |
| johnV | Sunday, April 24, 2022 - 11:26 am
Publicly owned Assets maint corps do not hold enough cash and go into debt even when constantly making a profit.
 |
| Lord Mndz | Sunday, April 24, 2022 - 03:13 pm
Andy,
one more question, what happens to materials when corporation closes? few hundreds of my corporations were closed but I don't see increase in materials CEO has, there should have been tens of trillions worth of materials transfered to my CEO stock. what happened to them. |
| Johanas Bilderberg | Sunday, April 24, 2022 - 04:01 pm
It's very simple what I hope for Andy.
I have had defensive weapons maintenance corps since you introduced them, they had some fluctuations but now I can barely keep them open.
I am not a new player asking silly questions.
Something is fundamentally wrong for long term functional, profitable corporations to suddenly start failing.
Something is obviously wrong when multiple long term experienced players point out a problem to you as well.
I would like a simple fix to be able to determine from the orders page which supplies are in shortage and order them to start. The current process involves back and forth between pages to determine which of multiple orders are in shortage.
Second I would like a fix for supply contracts to these corps so my common market orders work.
And third I would like discussion about eliminating the penalty for closing corporations in player controlled countries that are failing.
Not impossible requests IMO. |
| Jiggle Billy | Sunday, April 24, 2022 - 04:20 pm
Deleted do to missing further messages |
| Andy | Sunday, April 24, 2022 - 10:25 pm
Many of the corporations owned by this enterprise showed lack of workers and produce at 5%.
some closed but many more are showing warning messages about shortage of workers and might close.
they need cash transfers from the ceo and they will survive.
recent changes in maintenance corporations increased their size a bit but the main change is, a much much higher profit potential.
they are now able to increase profits by 50-70%
on top of that, shortages of materials they need (unchanged for a long time), are now less severe. They can now purchase more materials and the average production is increased a lot.
you can see the numbers on the utilization page.
the reduced shortages are causing a broader increase in production levels.
This is reducing shortages.
The increase in the size of some corporations, three rounds of increases, did hit very large enterprises harder.
Countries must find the additional workers within the country itself.
a huge enterprise, is looking for workers in hundreds of countries, small numbers in each country, and as it looks now, your corporations were short of workers even before.
the workers shortages are wide spread and amount to 95% reduction in production levels in many corporations. I did not see shortage of materials but I did not look at all of them.
in our opinion, the size is a problem.
I looked into more countries with a population of 100+ millions and they were affected by the increase in size but the changes were small.
I have a country with 600 millions too.
that one, Andy on KB, needed a series of manual shifts in professionals and exchanges with other countries.
I think that the 1000 corporations problem in countries is probably gone. There will be many more small increases with minor effects.
I also think that large enterprises are a problem, we differ on that one and I hope the numbers of corporations will decline.
These enterprises are also paying more taxes but only if they are profitable.
Profitability in general, for all corporations is increased very strongly in the past weeks. There are more increases in profitability in nearly all types of corporations. |
| Andy | Sunday, April 24, 2022 - 10:41 pm
Mndz,
We have never claimed that bankrupted, or otherwise closed corporations are preserving their assets.
There is a level of processing, aimed at the payment of loans.
the corporation closing process will try to raise cash to pay the outstanding loans, and salaries to workers. It will also try to get rid of all outstanding orders, offers and contracts.
Beyond that, it is unclear what happens.
Closing corporations are no fun.
They cause unemployment and loss of resources.
Many players, probably all, experienced closing corporations but many do now have as many corporations as the number you have lost.
It seems that you did what was needed and stopped the closures. |
| Lord Mndz | Monday, April 25, 2022 - 10:24 am
Hi Andy,
i don't understand why it is unclear what happens to the corporation when it closes. the process must be very clear and documented, how otherwise you would know what happens in general to fix it?
currently corporations hold materials in quantities larger than ever before so prior closing they have to sell that to reduce loans or transfer the materials to the owner of corporations.
p.s. stopping costed me 400T so I really want to understand what is going on before another injection would be needed. |
| Andy | Monday, April 25, 2022 - 01:27 pm
Unclear is not the right term.
When a corporations closes, everything is lost. we have no idea.
except for several things I specified, we do take care of.
Corporations are very large, have many assets and it is essential to make sure they have large amounts of cash to prevent them from going under.
They were producing at 5% for some time before cash started to run out.
It is not the raw materials because at 5% production you use close to nothing.
There is always a lot of time to do so.
they take loans, then more loans, then there is a warning that there are high loans and only then they close.
They did not close all in one month but in 15-20 months.
Takes some time to find out as the corporation list is quite long and most of the problems were close to the bottom of the list. |
| Andy | Monday, April 25, 2022 - 01:32 pm
John,
We just recently increased all cash levels in corporations and increase the loans limits before the first warning appears.
Keeping cash levels in corporations can be done with one action for all 5000+ corporations.
as I wrote above, the problem was not the raw materials. the corporations produced at 5%. many more do so, and at that level also use 5% of materials.
Cargo shuttle corporations use much more cash and you know how to keep them alive.
these corporations are half the size or less. |
| Andy | Monday, April 25, 2022 - 01:40 pm
Johanas,
Check these corporations again.
even in this enterprise owned by Mndz.
Their profits are shooting up.
just give them what they need and their profits will be very high.
you do need to have he raw materials and the workers they need.
The profitability of all the defense related maintenance products is increased gradually over the past weeks and months and is now extreme.
I have a country with a population of 600.000.000 with many such corporations.
none of them closed or even has any loans.
they are very profitable. except for a small number trying to get to 100% hiring but they will not close any time soon. |
| Johanas Bilderberg | Monday, April 25, 2022 - 02:10 pm
Needing materials is the entire point.
I asked for a simple way to determine which orders are in shortage from the order page. |
| Andy | Monday, April 25, 2022 - 04:17 pm
You wondered in fact how these corporations could fail.
I explained.
They failed for quite a long time before they closed.
They failed mainly because of shortages of workers.
You need to scroll along the entire corporations page and you quickly see where high loan warnings are showing.
There were many.
scrolling along 5500 corporations is however probably the last thing you want to do.
This happens a lot and adding cash to the corporations prevents them from failing.
Proving this point:
It stopped immediately when cash was added and profitability is increasing.
I do not think I am telling you here something you did not know yet.
The other question:
I do not understand what you mean by
"determine which orders are in shortage from the order page."
The order tab, on the corporations page, shows all outstanding orders and the last column shows shortage or oversupply.
We updated this page some months ago to allow for quick ordering of everything corporations need in case of shortages.
Most countries and enterprises probably show tens of outstanding orders.
Huge entities show many more.
My 600.000.000 population country, frequently shows more than 1000 outstanding orders.
Please explain exactly what you mean. |
| T M | Wednesday, April 27, 2022 - 10:31 am
I believe the original topic of this thread is that owners of the Maintenance corps are tired of babying them. We would like to be able to use the common market but then we have to keep turning off the supply line because they purchase whole units and only use a fractional unit.
The second issue is that the cost of the materials makes them go into to debt regularly. If you use 25 drones per month and have to buy hundreds of them at a time to stay open, you quickly go into debt when more than one weapon is purchased at once. On top of that the corporations keep stacking order one on top of the other and you have to keep canceling the newest ones. Then the lag time for weapons is great, over 5 years and as a result you have to either have orders that are continually on back order until they pop, or you have to immediately order, or you have to have large quantities on hand or you have to make larger purchases all at once. Finally you need a lot of cash to do this and you hit the purchasing or cash limit for the company and often go into debt and the corp is threatened with being closed.
These are unique issues to Maintenance Corps. I don't have this sort of headache for the other corporations. So unless the idea is have c3s run all maintenance corps, the cost benefit analysis is not good for these corps. Obviously we want to be able to help meet the shortage, you have said players like jumping into corps that have shortages. But the issues above are not a fun aspect of daily tasks hence the thread topic, babying these corps.
Here are the issues we have that we would like addressed in a meaningful way (based on the above mentioned posts):
1. Create a way to keep supplies in the corps without going bankrupt and without daily immediate purchases to keep them running.
That's it.
It would be nice along the way to A. stop the corps from stacking missing orders over and over, B.Not have them slip into so much debt so quickly, C. be able to address the problem with your common market but because of the whole units issue you have to keep going back and cancelling contracts. On this topic too they require so many materials like missile systems that smaller enterprises or countries cant keep all the supplies supplied).
This is the heart of the thread and the issue. While I understand big enterprises are hard to manage, adding in the babying of these corps compounds the issue and makes players not want to keep or open them. Thus the shortages, that every country needs, continue at astronomical deficits where no country can get weapons maintenance except through immediate purchase. |
| Andy | Wednesday, April 27, 2022 - 02:49 pm
The first issue was answered.
the raw materials items are large and expensive.
we cannot increase the use to a multiply of 12 of these corporations will become 5 times larger and even harder to manage.
The corporations need cash but also earn a lot of cash.
to make life easier, the last upgrade, today, increased the cash transfer levels to 120B from 80B. (already in place) and automatic transfers out of the corporations is also at the 120B level.
The debt level of these corporations is increased twice recently and they do not bankrupt so quickly at all.
This will make it easier.
In addition, supply shortages are down.
You can of course decide not to have these corporations. There are many other types of corporations that are probably easier to have.
In the past, we advised against cargo shuttle corporations because of the cash management problem.
The maintenance corporations became larger and may require more attention
but
Both cargo shuttle corporations and the maintenance corporations are extremely profitable.
I think that players always discovered which types of corporations are most profitable and built them to make large profits.
We have now made life easier by lifting cash and loan limits.
we do not want to trivialize it any further.
The latest closing of some of these corporations, made clear that it does not happen overnight.
It takes quite some time and does not need daily babysitting.
Even combined with shortages of workers and very low production levels, it took 10 days or longer to fail. I checked our logs to find out. |
