| chrysostom (White Giant) | Tuesday, April 21, 2009 - 05:27 am 
The 30,000 max conversion to HLW works fine if a country has a population of of 15 million. But if the population is 50 million, a higher max conversion rate is needed. |
| Pathetic Sheep (Little Upsilon) | Tuesday, April 21, 2009 - 09:51 am
By the time you have 50 million people you should already have upgraded corporations and a stable work force.
You can also trade with countries that have less than 15M. It is a good way for old empires to help out new presidents. |
| Keith Allaire (Little Upsilon) | Tuesday, April 21, 2009 - 06:48 pm
That's the point, upgraded corporations require MORE HLW, not fewer, thus making the pop conversion bottleneck even worse.
The only way I was able to fix the HLW problem in the one country I didn't sell was raiding the other countries in my empire for HLW before the cash market auctions processed--I needed 500+k and it would've taken me days to fix by logging in to do conversions once every four hours. Had I kept the empire instead of selling it off fixing the shortages would've required waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more time than I was willing to put into the game. |
| Pathetic Sheep (Little Upsilon) | Wednesday, April 22, 2009 - 04:51 am
you can move 400,000 workers in your empire in one log in. granted that would be ~320,000 hlw in trade. Convert 50,000 nurses and get 30,000 and that adds up to 400,000.
Show me a country with more than 1/6th of the population as high level workers. Show me some country with a birth rate of 2,000 per year. I don't think either exist. If you get your population at a reasonable it shouldn't be a problem. |
| Keith Allaire (Little Upsilon) | Wednesday, April 22, 2009 - 10:47 am
And it takes an hour to do with slow page load times.
And that is merely per game month. The next game month my HLW had taken up other professions again.
Compounded by the fact that an importation of 200k MLW from an external supplier would be slurped up by my education system in less than a real day (often I burned through 300-400k MLW in a single day just because of education/shift in professionals)
Repeat process.
I banged my head against the wall doing this about four times a day at my peak of activity, all to keep full employment for CEOs so that I could profit. My empire was pretty big. Perhaps if conversion capacity was based on pop, I could've done this once or twice a day.
GM nerfed profit. Even worse, the GM tried to hide it from the player community for six weeks. The only reason why I suffered such micromanagement evaporated away. I stopped caring.
My empire had to go eventually. Sheep, apparently you didn't notice I sold down to one nation. It is much more manageable with only one nation now, instead of seven. And a nation with only 85% employment, at that. I could raise employment to 95% with some lovin' but I just no longer care. It can run on autopilot. At 85% I scarcely have to worry about worker shortages at all.
I no longer play to see how shiny and perfect my nation can be. I play merely because my empires and my CEOs were extended for some ungodly period back in December, before the GM made a complete ass of himself and I decided I would not renew in late January.
I play merely to see how many GC I can add to the proceeds from the sale of my empire before then, that I may sell such GC on paypal and recoup the "membership" fee I have paid during that time.
Anyway, I should probably end my meandering rant. It's 1:45 in the morning and I know I've strayed off-topic.  |
| chrysostom (White Giant) | Thursday, April 23, 2009 - 07:18 am
The point is that it is annoying to transfer the population.
I have gotten so sick of it, I am actually moving out corps that use alot of HLW. This includes transfering out 5 enterprise controlled public corps that, combined, paid over 125B in taxes last year (plus about 35b in salary taxes and plus a few billion via dividends). They are FMU corps that simply used too high a percentage of HLW. They use very few LLW, no MLW, and a higher-than-average number of HLW.
I am replacing them with corps that I expect will pay 40b less in taxes (when optimized) just to reduce the annoyance of transfering workers every day. |
| Psychotic Chicken (Little Upsilon) | Thursday, April 23, 2009 - 10:16 pm
Chrysostom,
Many of the corporations that use more hlw use fewer total workers. High tech and strategic corps for example.
I think automated worker transfers would be a huge improvement to the game. Even if it was limited to 10% (40,000 per month, 20,000 inter-empire) it would open a lot of possibilities and avoid some of the tedium.
Locking the HLW conversion to a constant per country rate helps new players and adds challenges for large countries. In general that is a good thing for games. It also encourages worker exchanges which can be good for a gaming environment. Veteran players can make deals with new players that are mutually beneficial. |
| Erotic Clown (Kebir Blue) | Friday, June 19, 2009 - 11:00 pm
I think that this is a pretty important conversation, as converting workers really is way too large a part of this game. And it's a pretty mindless activity; this would be a much better game were the majority of the decision making left to strategic decisions.
Even worse, after many many months of converting workers, it still isn't really clear to me how workers really shift from level to level. Most mysterious to me are low level workers, who seem to, rather than attend my surplus of schools, want only to be sucked up by the army; why is there no effective way to make us of excess LLW's besides through military means?
This confusion is symptomatic of an even larger problem; the vacuum where strategic decisions ought to be made on the part of the player is filled by the predispositions or ideological biases (call it what you like) of the game designers:
1. Private enterprise always trumps public enterprise in terms of efficiency, productivity, and overall social benefit. There is little room for the player to explore this question. From the perspective of a President, basically all the incentives are on the side of private enterprise.
2. There are some segments of a given society suited for little else than military service; no amount of investment (in health, education, and social security, etc.) can raise this segment's stake in the growth and profit of the overall society. The hierarchy and distribution of workers is totally based on the assumption that the largest segment of the population (LLW, housewives, disabled, etc.) must be subordinated to a much smaller but more educated/trained population. There's no way around this assumption.
I think that there's even more substance to this argument if one confronts aspects of the game that are relatively undeveloped or completely absent (conquest, diplomacy, government type, civil unrest, etc.). These are also perhaps areas that, if expanded or, in the case of government type / unrest, created, could provide a counterbalance to the strategic vacuum described above.
This game is getting boring. More strategy! |
| Laguna | Friday, June 19, 2009 - 11:06 pm
/me slaps the clown!
More people!
I'll settle for more humor, though. |
