| Hern | Thursday, June 29, 2023 - 03:40 pm 
There are issues with how the common market is implemented (beyond the shear number of clicks it takes to do anything.)
Product quality of a corporation is limited based on the process quality of the company. After a certain point, the quality of the goods used to create the product no longer impact the quality of the product. This can be mitigated with common strategies, like setting max bought product quality at 180. And this solution works fine when using the open market, but once you contract within the common market then you are stuck at the (probably higher) quality produced by the contracted corporation(s). This will result in the corporation paying for all consumable good qualities at much higher than the max efficiency of about 180, perhaps as high as 330, without any improvement in product quality.
This issue is made worse by the fact that common market usage adds to country and enterprise score, but in reality it's actually a huge detriment to their functioning at peak efficiency.
The same issue can be seen when contracting country needs as well, but for a different reason. Something like assets maintenance will be bought at 300 quality but is still spent at the same rates as if it were 120 quality (and with no benefits to that higher quality.)
I see a solution for both issues: scale the product quality of each corporation such that it can only be maxed when all goods are of maxed quality (330). So countries' 200 quality will require goods of all 330 quality to produce a 270 quality product. This will maintain the advantage that enterprise and publicly controlled corps have, as they will require 330 inputs to get a 330 output. This will resolve the first issue and help push people to use public corps more.
The second issue is stated simply, but I can imagine it would require a large set of changes on the backend. Quality should scale the usage of products equally down. If a 330 quality good is used for Def Weapon Maint, it should reduce the number of Def Weapon Maint needed by 330/120 = 2.75x. This would make the cost of the good consistent across qualities (or even add a small boost, so that high quality is slightly more desirable.) This will, at the very least, allow countries to contract local companies for these static uses. Right now, doing so results in HUGE costs. |
