| caseysf1095 (White Giant) | Saturday, March 14, 2009 - 07:07 pm 
When I first signed on in November 2008, I thought that the common market aspect of the game was fantastic. I had a vision for a self-sufficient country that would be rewarded for it's efforts in supplying goods to its own people. Cool!
80 Corporations and minimal profitability later, it was early January, my common market score was off the charts! However, despite the score from only importing about 1% and exporting about 40% to the international markets, my profits were too low. What gives?
Apparently, I was buying Q296 supplies from myself to make Q296 products, and that meant an unnecessary increase of 50% to my supplies and maintenance product costs. I mean, an oil corporation that lost money when prices were at 500 bucks? Inconceivable!
But wait, there's more! From the common markets, I was purchasing some supplies at Q350+! That's almost paying double for supplies, no wonder I was in the red!
Suggested Fix 1:
A manual setting for equivalent output at a set quality. If I was to make 100 items at Q200, I could convert that to 200 items at Q100, or 50 items at Q400, etc.
This wouldn't solve all the problems, but at least we could buy properly qualitied supplies from our own companies and not have the Q296's go to waste.
Suggested Fix 2:
A manual setting for equivalent input as a set quality. If I purchased 100 items at Q200, it automatically gets converted to 200 items at Q100, or if I had money to burn, 50 items at Q400.
This would solve most, if not all the common market/quality problems. I could still purchase Q370 items, but the corporation will down convert it to Q200, or whatever setting I choose, after the purchase. Not only would we NOT LOSE MONEY from overpurchasing, but the gamemaster would not need to subsidize purchases.
Eh? If I'm understanding the game engine properly, buying and selling go like this: Someone requests a Q100 item, but the only item offered is Q300, the buyer pays for Q100 to the seller, but the gamemaster subsidizes the additional Q200. Yes? With this new system, items could be purchased at any quality, be converted to the desired quality, and the payment is made in full by the buyer.
But wait, there's more, there's already a setting in place that could make this work! It's the "Supplies Quality" link under the corporation page. So we're already specifying what quality of supplies we buy. How about we just add a few lines of code that auto-convert any purchased item to the player's specified quality? Wouldn't that solve most of our problems, including the one where we're not getting Q350 payments for our Q350 sales? We just lower our supply quality so that we produce exactly Q300, while still purchasing Q370 supplies from the common market. Done! |
| shaun (Little Upsilon) | Sunday, March 15, 2009 - 02:19 pm
eh i think we all know common markets are not to be used except for last resort ie your being boycotted so how lucky you can be self sufficient sort of thing...how about you just stop losing money using it? |
| chrysostom (White Giant) | Sunday, March 15, 2009 - 07:51 pm
The solution for you is simple, lower the quality of the products you produce. |
| kpaskowski1 (White Giant) | Tuesday, March 31, 2009 - 06:36 am
did i miss the boat on this?! i thought you wanted a country to be somewhere between 50 and 75% self sufficient and make your profit by building corporations that would be almost solely exports only? or selling the excess goods and services that your country didnt need. |
| Pathetic Sheep (Little Upsilon) | Tuesday, March 31, 2009 - 07:04 am
That boat you missed was very high quality. :P
The way I make sense of quality in simcountry is to compare it to real world batteries. The alkaline cell is old technology. They are all 1.5 volts and are based on the charge potential of zinc and manganese dioxide. They are all the same. Any 2 alkaline batteries last the same length of time and have the same stored energy if they are still fully charged when you get them (obviously C size has more than AA etc). Someone spent enormous piles of cash in order to force people to watch a stupid toy rabbit hitting a drum. Now batteries from that company sell for 2 and occasionally 3 times as much as identical batteries assembled with the same chemical vat at the same plant and sold on the same rack.
Yes, this is stupid. Unfortunately it also simulates some real world phenomena. |
| Mercurio Maudlinfae (Little Upsilon) | Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - 10:59 pm
I wonder where the money for quality goods comes from..
I dont want to pay 3 times the price for factory maintenance units just because they have a good "quality".. I dont CARE about the quality since it doesnt contribute anything to my profits or productivity there. I constantly get into reds because my ELECTRIC POWER costs more than 150k each due to "quality".. How can you determine quality in electric power anyway?
Its ridiculous since those high-quality-raws barely even increase my own products quality, which in turn causes the same problem to my customers. Its like an endless upwards slope of quality that nobody really pays for. The end-customer is always the countries populace, but that doesnt seem to pay more for higher quality goods (i think)..
in the end i feel better off just buying q100 raws or producing them on my own, than to rely on the mercy of ridiculous automatic pricing. they should really make it so that 1000 q200 oil can be converted into 2000 q100 or 500 q400 oil..
the same system worked pretty well in a similar simulation browsergame. |
| SolidSamurai (Fearless Blue) | Monday, October 11, 2010 - 11:13 am
Suggested Fix 1:
A manual setting for equivalent output at a set quality. If I was to make 100 items at Q200, I could convert that to 200 items at Q100, or 50 items at Q400, etc.
This wouldn't solve all the problems, but at least we could buy properly qualitied supplies from our own companies and not have the Q296's go to waste.
---
The above obviously offers a huge advantage to potential profits and contracting. In order to encourage not everyone to simply do this, there should be a fee slapped onto one of the costs (maybe 'fixed property' considering the FMUs need to be fitted to more than one design) to reflect 'product diversity' among a corporation.
Corporations in the real world produce diverse products. Ie. The economy car and the SUV all from Mitsubishi (or whatever the hell they produce).
Note also that the first and second fix also ignore the purpose of effectiveness upgrades, which are there to make production cheaper and effectively produce more. |
