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Sunday, June 21, 2009 - 03:27 pm  There seems to be a contradiction between Profit -loss defense expenditures (179 B) versus cash outflow defense (2.02 T). When I review recent purchases I don't see these massive expenditures. Note the abrupt changes in cash don't occur every month but have occurred twice in the past three days, with cash suddenly changing from +10B to -400B or -600B, even at time when the country is showing a profit each month. This looks like a bug to me--Can the gamemasters review this? The country in question is Mullin.
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| Sunday, June 21, 2009 - 09:45 pm The cash charges are still occuring. Despite running a 17B /month profit, the cash charges have driven my net worth to -300B. Much of this has ocurred while I'm unable to spend because my cash position is negative. The game is umplayable right now until SimC staff fixes the bug. How long will it take the gamemasters to fix this problem? I want a time credit for the time the game was unplayable and some gold coins for the aggrevation!
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| Sunday, June 21, 2009 - 10:13 pm In accounting, income and expenses can either be current or capital. Current income or expenses are those which repeat periodically. For example: dividends and interests, rent and salaries. In the game, an example of current expenses are the salaries you pay to your health staff, and as an example of current income there's the tax collected from corporations. Capital income or expenses are those which occur only punctually - the purchase of an estate in Estoril or winning the lottery. In the game, purchasing schools, hospitals, or, in this case, weapons are treated as capital expenses. If someone buys one of your corporations, we are talking about capital income. To put it in a simple (but wrong) manner: Current expenses/income are those which are expected; capital expenses/income are those which aren't. What you are seeing is the difference between current expenses (maintenance of the army) and capital expenses (purchase of ammunition or weapons). The game is classifying and calculating things correctly. You are spending 179B yearly(?) on defense, and you spent 2.02T in weapons and ammunition this current year. I suggest that you halt your purchases (manual and auto orderings), to stop this. If you aren't ordering manually, review your auto orders. The weapons could be going into your garrisons. Reach level two first, though, for the Gold Coins, if you already haven't. I do know your country is buying weapons, from looking at your graphs. Also, if your country/empire is profitable, debt doesn't matter much.
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| Monday, June 22, 2009 - 06:20 am I looked at the record of purchases and those there didn't came close to 2T. The cash outflow continued long after my case balence went negative; after that I couldn't make purchases even if I wanted. I've been very slow in building up my armies so as to not hurt employment in my corps and to match my availble $. There's no evidence of workers being diverted to the armies, and no evidence of these huge numbers of weapons showing up in my stock column. If they'd been there I'd have immediatly sold them. If weapons were purchased they must have beem all ammo (no worker diversion) and showed up only in the garrisons. The only graphs I see are cash disbursement graph. Are there some graphs showing weapons purchased? At firstI looked to see if these weapons purchases had caused my defense and offense index to increase and it hadn't but I'll recheck. I'm still convinced there's, a bug in the cash disbursements, but I'll look to see if some auto order thing has kicked in. I've been going through the pending deliveries for some time and cancelling immediate purchases and weapons purchases I can't use, but these orders have never approached the Trillion $ levels. Thanks for looking into this! I personally think there's a serious flaw in SimC if auto purchases can do so much damage, but I'll put in a little more effort in figuring this out.
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| Monday, June 22, 2009 - 01:46 pm The log of purchases you see logs exclusively contracts and direct trades. Purchases on the open market aren't accounted for on that log. Plus, quality matters, along with quantity.
Your army is growing, weapons are being purchased. By looking at the beginning of the graphs, on the amounts and slope, they were on contract. In the past three game months, the contracts were either canceled or failed to be honored.
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| Monday, June 22, 2009 - 03:26 pm I can't figure out how to disable auto purchases. Purchases are still occuring (based on my increasing debt level), at a time when my debt level is supposed to forbid purchases (according to the pop-up). To me it seems outrageous that the purchase log only shows some of the purchases. These sort of complexities make the game inaccessible to any but the most experienced players. It's unfortunate that the "financial statement" doesn't have a section showing capital expenditures, so players wouldn't be caught by surprise by these sorts of things. I took a look at the War/defense/inspect troop screen and it does have a row saying that defense expenditures YTD is 4.3 T SC$. The weapons shown seem pretty small for that amount of SC$, but I don't have time to generate a spreadsheet to see if weapons costs reconcile back to items on hand and cost per item. I have to admit that I've been focused on the economic development part of the game and haven't spent much time on learning the war screens. It appears that the high debt has caused the system to cancel my weapons contracts with Mullin. These contract are longstanding and have never generated a problem in the past. I'm sending these weapons to countries where I need to increase my defense ratings and will order sell of a GC in each country to assure they don't also run into a cash problem. I hoard GC's so i can hanle these sort of things. Can you get back to me on how to stop any auto purchases? I looked at the settings screens and didn't see anything there. I'm afraid that when (and if) my GC sales clear, the SimC auto system will send me right back into bankruptcy. Thanks again for working with me on this.
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| Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - 12:07 am Thanks Lagune--You were right! I cancelled all my weapons contracts April 9 (SC), and though 150B SC$ appeared in May, In June since from June 5 June 11 no more charges appeared, so all those charges were contracted. I have to appologize for being a contentious idiot (unfortunately neither the first or last time.) I really don't regret these expenditures as they increased my defense (or offense capacity) though I sure wish I'd known how to use the particulars of the cash expenditure to monitor what I was doing. Now I can start again working on getting my defense index up--as you noted, I need to get to level 2. I'll probably use whatever GTC's needed to get my two slave countries to higher defensive ratings, just being sure I can stiill operate each country at a profit after ongoing defense costs. I'm guessing I have to get my weighted (by Pop) defense index up to 75 to get to level 2. Thanks a lot
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| Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - 03:12 am Please look at July! Somehow $600B SC (toward the end of June )was spent even with all weapons contracts cancelled. The only weapons I ordered was 6 cargo planes to assist my Fed in a war declared against IrishTiger They haven't been delivered yet. I'm guessing on the spending--I'm not sure what the late June figure was my recollection is that it was $900B but I didn't write it down then as I thought my contracts were the problem and it'd been solved. I'd checked to assure that auto purchases in the automation screen wasn't allowed and they weren't.
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| Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - 06:46 am Once again massive defense expenditures in July, even though all weopons contracts were closed in April. Is anyone able to figure out what's causing this? This has sure taken all the fun out of this game.
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| Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - 11:50 am Recall your garrisons on fortifications now. That's all there's left to be done.
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| Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - 02:52 pm Anoher brilliant idea, the auto supply of garrisons.
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| Thursday, June 25, 2009 - 11:58 am Yep--Laguna had to explain how to "recall" garrisons. You go to the "deploy garrisons" screen, and change fortifications, cities, etc to "undefended". Doing that stopped the expenditures. Apparently the SimC system concluded I needed more Ammo for my garrisons and spent about 5 T SC$ fixing what it thought was a problem. I've noticed how when SimC orders, it puts "immediate" on many purchases, so there's no telling how much you'll pay. I suppose that happened here. Only here there's no way to cancel, no record that it happened, and the only indication is the increase in cash outlays (capital--not ongoing). for cap defense. My thoughts are (1) we need a section in the financial report that breaks out capital weapns expenditue into President ordered, Auto ordered (those that show in the "pending deliveries"), contracted, and garrison ordered. (2)We need a warning when the SimC system decides to "help" us run a country --and a chance to overide, (3)we need to move back to 3 months per calendar day. I struggle to find time to do all the routine things to run my countries and enterprise, and if anything like this comes up I have to decide what will go undone. Is there a world in SimC where we have only 3 days per month. The last time I looked GR as listed that way so I don't trust what they show on the website.\ Oh, what to do in the interim. If you have any garrissons be sure they have at least the default ratio of weapons per battery, otherwise "recall" them. I'm just guessing on this--Anyone who has experience with this will hopefully let us know what works.
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