| Andy | Saturday, July 27, 2024 - 10:13 am 
The Cost of the Army
To make it easier for newer players to build their army, many weapons and ammunitions will become a bit cheaper.
The corporations producing them, will produce a bit more and their profitability will remain as before.
The increased production levels will also help to reduce the continuing large shortages in many products.
The changes will not cause any major shakeup in the markets.
The maintenance cost of the army on the other hand, will increase for some weapons. The increase will not be significant for countries with small and reasonable armies.
An uptick in production levels
More corporations will produce a bit more. This was done several times before and as a result, shortages of products are now at lower levels than before. It is however not good enough.
An increase in production usually comes with a slight decrease in the price of the products.
Profitability will remain the same or increase a bit because the cost of raw materials needed for the production process will decline a bit.
also this change is not large enough to change much in the markets.
Electric Power
EP price will decline a bit more. The profitability of all EP producing corporations will remain largely unchanged.
The income of countries from EP produced by wind farms will be influenced more by the market price with all advantages and increased risks that come with it.
Wind Farms
Wind farms will remain very profitable (as mentioned before) but remain risky in large numbers.
we keep saying that, and have already seen several episodes of declining price of EP.
We think that very large numbers of wind farms is a major risk.
Also the millions of workers, involved in the maintenance of thousands of wind farms can become a problem for the countries and reduce its capacity to build other corporations.
Shortage of wind turbines in countries with wind farms
we have waited with the resolution of maintenance issues of wind farms to allow for more time for players to resolve shortages.
The coming game update will not include any change in that area but the game upgrade after the next, will include a function that will reduce the output of wind farms that are not being maintained.
if shortages of wind farms are very large (compared to the number of wind farms in the country), the production levels could be diminished and wind farms could even break down completely and disappear.
We have announced this several times in the past months and requested players to eliminate the shortages of wind turbines needed for the maintenance. |
| auditor | Saturday, July 27, 2024 - 09:21 pm
I mean, I guess its effort in a way. So I'll give you credit for that. You say 'some' and 'many' an awful lot on a game that is literally just numbers. If you're reducing prices, increasing prices, lowering/raising production, say what products. Say what changes. You presumably don't just hit the keyboard at random with a mallet when you make these changes, say what you are doing. Your announcements are incredibly vague, and again this is a game purely about numbers. Nobody's asking you to reveal calculations or behind the scenes information. But especially when you are altering base prices or corporation production levels, be specific.
Updates should look like this. Please note for the most part these are just examples (though the EP Q = WT Q would be super welcome and help salvage a crippled dying key part of the game):
Product Price Changes
*Electric Power base price 231,000 -> 210,000
*Mid Range Missiles base price 3.15M -> 3.05M
Product Corporation Changes
*Mid Range Missiles monthly production 400 -> 405
Additional Changes
*Wind Farms will no longer generate Electric Power for a country if the country has a shortage of appropriate maintenance items. 1% of the country's Wind Farms will be automatically destroyed each month that the country's Wind Turbines supply is in shortage.
*Electric Power provided by Wind Farms will now be provided to the country at a Quality equal to the Quality of the country's supply of Wind Turbines.
Notes
This is where you add your opinion and personal notes about the changes. Share the information, then if you feel you have to add your personal opinion to it do it separately. |
| rob72966 | Saturday, July 27, 2024 - 09:51 pm
Could not agree more. auditor has a valid point. I hope to see these changes implemented.
Rob |
| James Folsom | Sunday, July 28, 2024 - 01:04 am
Quote:e think that very large numbers of wind farms is a major risk.
Also the millions of workers, involved in the maintenance of thousands of wind farms can become a problem for the countries and reduce its capacity to build other corporations.
Are these workers in wind turbine corps, or do wind farms have alot of workers that are not disclosed?
If so is this info available somewhere?
-hymy- |
| Andy | Monday, July 29, 2024 - 06:29 pm
The exact conditions around shortages of wind turbines and the reduction percentages in the production will be published before the relevant upgrade.
It is now several months after we announced this and everyone had a lot of time to reduce shortages of wind turbines.
we now think that a shortage should be seen relative to the numbers needed.
Example with a country that has 1000 wind farms:
If you have 1000 wind farms and a shortage of 20 wind turbines, then 20 wind farms are not maintained.
This is 20 out of 1000 wind farms, or 2%.
If you have a shortage of 500 that will be 50% reduction of power.
at 1000 shortage, there will be no power output.
If the shortage is higher, a shortage of additional 1000 wind turbines, will cause the destruction of one wind farm. Max 2 or 3 each month.
Depending on the shortages we see when it is implemented, we might slow down the damage to 10% or 20% of this and gradually increase to 100% in a period of several weeks.
a much better idea is to make sure you have enough wind turbines for maintenance and have a constant stream of income from these wind farms.
we will also add more data about the numbers of workers involved in the maintenance per wind farm. |
| Prince Greg | Monday, July 29, 2024 - 11:08 pm
Hi Andy,
I have observed some great players, who have significantly contributed and assisted newcomers in the game, shutting down their operations. They are finding it challenging to keep up with the so-called innovations and upgrades how much more new players?
Given the current deficit in wind turbines, how do you expect players to manage such shortages? I've noticed that some players with 2000 or more wind farms are facing shortages exceeding 200,000 wind turbines. Despite their efforts to fill these shortages, a day or two of inactivity leads to significant disruptions.
Are you aware of the irregularities in product purchases? Just two or three days away from the game can lead to substantial impacts.
Regarding wind farm maintenance, when a wind farm is destroyed, what happens to the products? Is there any contingency plan considering the cost of purchasing these turbines? Also, what about the existing turbine shortages that have already been created? Will those shortages automatically resolve?
Thank you for addressing these concerns. |
| Zentrino | Tuesday, July 30, 2024 - 08:55 am
With WT in such a massive shortage (6M+ on WG), why has the max price decreased recently? It used to be 220M and slowly raised to 222M where it has been for over a month. The max price is now 213M though. WT corps only produce 23 per game month so the shortage will continue to be huge. The max price should be going up if it is going to change.
I do agree with Greg that being away for even a few days can be challenging in many cases. I was gone all weekend on a trip. My countries are mostly okay but I had big surpluses of WTs in them. I have been mass ordering them at max price once or twice a RL day for over a month in addition to contracting them to myself in each country. This resulted in supplies of 100k plus in most countries. If I was gone more than a few days, I would be in the red. I don't necessarily think this is a bad idea. It is my choice to have so many WF and high need for WT. I appreciate we were given time to make changes the last couple of months.
My country with the most WFs in it (Neverondona Mapayapa on WG with 3700+ farms) has a shortage of WTs. I haven't been able to get much surplus because it uses so many. It would help if I could do larger direct sales from my CEO to it. Currently, I can place an order on the market for 16,910 at max price (213M). If I direct sale from my CEO, it is only about 10k Wts. This doesn't make sense. I should be able to direct sale at least the same number, but preferably more. My main country (Nevrondona Empire) has a surplus of about 130k WTs. It would be nice if I could transfer 30k WT from it to Mapayapa but I can't. |
| Andy | Tuesday, July 30, 2024 - 10:51 am
The maintenance measures will take some time to kick in.
wind turbine corporations are very profitable and they have a huge market value.
reducing their max price does nothing to change that and it failed to trigger an increase in their production.
they are all at the top of the pricing range.
The profitability of the corporations is hardly changed.
the side effect of course, is a decline in the maintenance cost of wind farms.
Is that also bad?
We keep saying for months, that too many wind farms are bad for your country.
we suggested that even 1000 of them are too many.
so why are you bringing 2000 wind farms as an example.
It is bad for the country and we said many times you should not have such numbers because it is very very difficult to purchase thousands of wind turbines each month for maintenance.
now the complaint is that it is very hard to purchase 2000 wind turbines each month for maintenance.
Players also asked for the possibility to remove wind farms.
this is added long time ago.
please remove wind farms you cannot maintain, as predicted for a long time, and despite all these warnings, these players continued building wind farms.
Electric power price goes down by 10% was mentioned as a reason for players to leave.
impossible maintenance of far too many windfarms is another one?
what exactly do you mean?
no maintenance of wind farms?
Wind farms are much more profitable if you just don't purchase the wind turbines.
Should we add 1.000.000 wind turbines to each country in all worlds and resolve the problem once and for all?
Each and every little issue is presented as an existential problem.
we have that from day one.
If people leave, many times after years here, it is probably time to leave.
people stay here for years because they love the game.
and every day, new players join.
I would love to see them stay here but threats of leaving do not work. |
| Zentrino | Tuesday, July 30, 2024 - 08:32 pm
Andy,
I am not sure who you are complaining to in your post. I said I know I made a choice that makes it hard to maintain, and I accept that I have to manually place large orders constantly to keep things running. I know being gone a few days will cause me some problems. That's fair. It's my choice.
I wanted to know why I can place an order on the market that is larger than the number I can direct sale country to country or ceo to country. It seems that number should either be the same or larger. It also feels weird that the only product I know that can't be shipped on cargo shuttles or direct traded is wind turbines. Seems like a choice to make it harder, which is your prerogative. My countries do just fine with 2000+ WFs though.
Decreasing the max cost is fine but it feels counter intuitive to a market so in the red. I certainly don't mind paying less though. |
| Andy | Tuesday, July 30, 2024 - 09:35 pm
The price range is unrelated to oversupply or a shortage.
the price range is set to prevent extreme pricing (high or low) that can cause the corporation to fail.
The price range for wind turbines and wind farms isgoes far higher than most other products.
It is by the way possible to move wind turbines by cargo shuttle.
one wind turbine fits in a cargo shuttle.
this was so from day one. |
| Emerithe Cantanine | Wednesday, July 31, 2024 - 02:54 am
Actually on day 1 you could fit 2 wind turbines in a cargo shuttle. For whatever reason you changed it to 1 per shuttle sometime later.
Also to be fair to Zentrino you have implied in the past that you wanted wind turbines to be items that could not be transported. He must have thought that you had made that change already. |
| Zentrino | Wednesday, July 31, 2024 - 06:14 am
I tried to move some by shuttle several months ago and it didn't seem to work. The orders just sat there. I will try again. |
| Andy | Wednesday, July 31, 2024 - 07:49 am
Wind turbines could be transported by cargo shuttle from the start.
One wind turbine at a time. This was never an issue and we have never said they should not be transported in this way.
There was once a discussion about making it faster by allowing shuttles to
transport more than one at a time.
Wind Farms however, cannot be moved by cargo shuttle. These are fixed object, like schools, hospitals and military bases and cannot be transported.
Maybe there was a confusion between turbines and farms.
Zentrino,
If you have a difficulty there, please let me know.
when TA started, my first transport was wind turbines. it was not very fast. |
| Andy | Wednesday, July 31, 2024 - 01:59 pm
Auditor,
Please make comments on this forum that are about the content of the game. |
| rob72966 | Wednesday, July 31, 2024 - 09:38 pm
auditor perhaps your comments should have been put in the suggestion section of the forum. |
| Zentrino | Thursday, August 1, 2024 - 09:26 am
Where are auditor's comments? |
| Prince Greg | Thursday, August 1, 2024 - 09:32 am
Andy deleted them! He does that always. |
| Andy | Thursday, August 1, 2024 - 03:03 pm
Yes.
we always delete everything. Thank you for mentioning it.
We asked for messages to be about the content of the game.
these comments were in many cases very helpful.
instead we get messages and opinions about us and not about game issues.
we always also remove people who do this from the forum. |
| Supercheese | Thursday, August 1, 2024 - 06:33 pm
Andy, you as the developer you are as much apart of the game as apart of the game as any of the other topics that get discussed here. The things you do impact us just as much as windfarms, electric power prices, or product shortages on the market you are trying to fix over time. If someone has an issue with the things you do as the developer, that is a game issue, not a personal attack on you as a person. |
| Andy | Friday, August 2, 2024 - 07:59 am
Please do not place messages here that are not relevant to this discussion. |
| Andy | Friday, August 2, 2024 - 08:07 am
There are indeed huge shortages of wind turbines.
the shortages are the result of the building of many wind farms that need wind turbines for maintenance.
Placing orders for wind turbines on the market does not help.
there are none available.
if you have 100 wind farms, they use 100 wind turbines each month.
the only safe solution is to build 5 wind turbine corporations in your country and contract them to your country.
this is quite easy to do and you will have not delivery problems.
If you have 2000 wind farms, that is another matter.
you will need 100 wind turbine corporations and your country, in that case, will probably produce nothing else.
This is why we have said so many times that you should not have so many wind farms.
we did not see numbers declining and we did not see a huge increase in the number of corporations producing wind turbines.
hence the shortages. |
| Clicks For Andy | Tuesday, August 6, 2024 - 01:31 pm
"This is why we have said so many times that you should not have so many wind farms.
we did not see numbers declining and we did not see a huge increase in the number of corporations producing wind turbines.
hence the shortages."
Yes people were not deleting wind farms, but wind turbine corps had several players building them as fast as they could, the game has limits on number of corps opened per month, number of corps pending construction, number of corps closed per month, etc... It is very difficult to impossible to rework an economy faster than many players were, and would require logging on every day which is not why people play a browser game, browser games have a level of casualness that allows taking periods of time off.
You've said it for over a year, but with how you made the mechanic those who didn't build more than you suggest ended up in a huge disadvantage to those who did, and the change took so damn long that those who did listen still game in and followed the others. This is a problem of YOUR making, this isn't "stupid playerbase" this is bad game management and development. |
| Andy | Tuesday, August 6, 2024 - 07:05 pm
We warned about this a very long time ago.
I have been in it too.
I also had shortages of wind turbines:
What I did:
1. Immediately contracted every wind turbine corporation to my countries
2. Stopped building wind farm corporations and turned all the ones I had to selling what they produce on the market. The numbers of wind farms corporations stopped growing.
3. I remove 4 corporations per game month, up to 12 (not 24) per day and built many more wind turbine corporations.
4. I did this in more than one country.
5. At some point most countries were OK and i contracted the wind turbines to countries with shortages.
I caught up fairly quickly and then started selling wind turbines on the market.
I could just remove many wind farms but did what I did to see how fast you can fix the problem.
In extreme cases, I think they should have removed some wind farms.
building more then 3 corporations per game month, or removing more than 4 is a problem.
These are huge corporations and 4 of them involve 1.5 million workers per month. Even this is unrealistic. |
| Zentrino | Tuesday, August 6, 2024 - 07:54 pm
Andy,
I did many of these things as well. But is not as straight forward as you imply. WF corps do not use the same numbers or types of workers as WT corps. You can't just close a WF and open a WT. WT corps rely much more heavily on HTE, HTS, and HTX. So you have to rebalance your education system to produce more of those before you have make a heavy switch. It works, but it takes time and commitment to logging in multiple times a day to do repetitive work. You've given us time, but it wasn't an easy transition as your post seems to imply. |
| Andy | Tuesday, August 6, 2024 - 08:10 pm
You are right but the process did work.
sometimes I was not able to build as many as I wanted but a day later was able to catch up.
I am not claiming that this is easy.
I tested it and I keep saying, sometimes you must remove many of the wind farms or you have a major risk.
in this environment, when very large offers are placed, the price of EP can dive for some time and then, with many wind farms, a country could bankrupt. |
| Clicks For Andy | Tuesday, August 6, 2024 - 08:50 pm
No one gets upset things are a challenge, people are upset that the way "a challenge" is being made is adding more log ins and clicks.
You used to be able to build new corps without full staffing, some inexperienced players f'd that up and you blocked that option. Note: poor documentation told the inexperienced player required more corps than their country could support.
This allowed you to in one sitting set up a string of new pending corps while you waited for old to close. Now you must log on, close corps, wait for workers to return to labor pool, wait for them to re-balance based on new education priorities, then finally you can build new corps. This requires multiple log ons and many clicks over multiple days.
This isn't more challenging, this isn't difficult, this isn't not easy, its just tedious. |
| Andy | Wednesday, August 7, 2024 - 07:37 am
Or you close a corporation that is not producing enough profit because of market conditions and build another.
the problems with so many countries that had too many corporations are over.
I do not think it is realistic to allow building of corporations if there are no workers to work there.
I think it also made players to realize what was going on with corporations.
before, some did not have any idea at all, that you needed workers to make a corporation function and we had many complaints from players asking why the corporations they have built are not working.
They asked questions on the forum and players and the gamemaster went to look at it and told them these corporations had no workers.
They also did nothing with the education to produce the workers they needed. |
| Clicks For Andy | Wednesday, August 7, 2024 - 02:50 pm
Often businesses start without workers in the real world, then ramp up hiring as they go.
So you removed a challenge and replaced it with clicks is what your describing, managing your workforce is a key aspect of the game. Instead of having beginner info help guide this you just reduced flexibility and made the game simpler to help prevent the mistake. |
| Andy | Wednesday, August 7, 2024 - 03:04 pm
Unlike the real world, corporations in Simcountry must be huge or countless.
they must have the workers or they fall into large losses.
you forget that before this was implemented, there were many complaints about corporations losing money while if hiring would be at 100%, they could make a fortune.
profits are now at very high levels and players make a lot of money.
I hear no complaints about money making. |
| Clicks For Andy | Wednesday, August 7, 2024 - 04:47 pm
"you forget that before this was implemented, there were many complaints about corporations losing money while if hiring would be at 100%, they could make a fortune."
I did not forget, I pointed out to you back then where game documentation encouraged creating too many corporations, this has never been fixed. "Important things" button.
With this new account I am seeing that the game doesn't even set new players starting education priorities to ideal max, let alone explain the mechanic. And auto adjustments are reducing the manually set priority for positions I have drastic shortages in to over educate LLM and MLM's.
As a new account I have high unemployment but due to poor workforce balance and this required full staffing I am going to be several days before I can even think of making progress on it, thats with knowing how it works, many new players will be driven right away.
Instead of fixing a known issue that encouraged unprofitable behavior you removed an option that was often useful for reworking an economy. Building corps without full staffing allowed you to close corps as new came online, allowed you to have staffing elsewhere making profits while corps upgrade (really useful with natural resources to ensure you got most money from limited resource) |
| Andy | Wednesday, August 7, 2024 - 11:30 pm
We probably must add more and updated info for new players.
any specific advise will help.
We will probably not agree on the 100% availability of workers.
Although some players might do OK with more flexibility, most of them don't read or listen.
they just keep building corporations. |
| auditor | Wednesday, August 7, 2024 - 11:47 pm
A lot of specific advice has been given to you over a long period of time for a lot of things, especially ideas to help new players. Take a gander at the suggestions forum. They're frequently ignored or deleted if you don't like them. It makes it hard to put in the effort to help you help the game. |
| Andy | Wednesday, August 7, 2024 - 11:52 pm
Deleted. More nonsense?
we never delete any text which is about the contents of the game and we have always encouraged players to publish their ideas.
many functions in Simcountry are the result of suggestions by players. |
| auditor | Thursday, August 8, 2024 - 12:14 am
A suggestion, maybe dial back on the sensitivity just a bit. You are taking far too much offense to one or two words that people have said to you and completely ignored the very serious very real problems that they bring up facing the game. You take everything personally and as a threat. Any player that reaches out, even in the form of an ultimatum, is giving you an opportunity to keep taking their money. As you're the representative of W3C, you have a fiduciary responsibility to your employer to provide customer service and manage this game. You seem to let your ego get in the way of that responsibility very frequently. For the sake of the game, you really need to look inward at your behavior. It is very unbecoming.
And because you say you don't delete anything that mentions contents of the game, here's a suggestion made before that is worth re-visiting if you're truly trying to look out for new players. Don't start them with the premade military that you are. Don't start them with any military at all. Figure out the base value of the military units you have them starting with and give them the equivalent cash. Have their game level by default calculated according to peaceful settings, and make the war game truly optional and something people can get into on their terms when you update the information and provide a more useful tutorial. Military right now is a stressful situation for a new player that puts a lot of pressure on them right off the start with the maintenance costs, even with their beginner bonuses. Let them ease into game mechanics instead of dumping everything on them at once. I might recommend an actual fully guided tutorial that they can opt into that takes them step by step through important pages like education, health, etc showing them important values on those pages and explains why those values are important and what they impact. |
| auditor | Thursday, August 8, 2024 - 12:20 am
And just checked the suggestion forum, the last response you made was in May, outside of a thread of mine in which you again insisted you know everything about wind despite the factual numbers information that was provided to you. And there have been threads since then. Again, that's the kind of thing that makes it hard to help you help the game when you go months ignoring your players, then come on the forum in a flurry over the last couple days openly criticizing your players and again ignoring their input, then saying advice from them will help. There's a whole lot of mixed message there. |
