W3C - Wind Farms

We have advised before and repeat this advise now, to limit the numbers of wind farms in a country.

There are many items in Simcountry where the numbers are not limited but building too many can destroy the country.
This includes all government facilities, army assest and much more.
You can build as many as you like but you will bankrupt the country.

same also as the number of countries in an empire.

We will remove the max number of wind farms you can build in a country and like many other country assets, there will be no max number. A limit possible suggests that the number is OK.

we do advise you, like with many other items, to limit the number of wind farms.

Wind farms are especially risky because their profitability is directly linked to the price of electric power on the markets.
In case the price of electric power will plunge, the income from wind farms will plunge too while the cost of maintenance will remain at the same level.
Countries with many wind farms may bankrupt.

All products in Simcountry had their ups and downs. They all had periods with shortages but all had also periods of oversupply.

Others could put this more eloquently, but I'm just going to be blunt. We're not stupid. Those of us with a large number of wind farms are aware of everything you mentioned already. If you look in my account for example, you'll see I have around 2.5B electric power stored between my countries and my account.

Even if I did sell all 2.5B electric power to the open market, the world is pretty resilient to shocks of surplus like that and electric power would go back into a shortage in about a week or so. It would probably take the combined efforts of everyone with large numbers of wind farms to push electric power into a surplus for the long term. However, like I said we're not stupid enough to do that. We want to keep riding the gravy train that is our wind farms. We don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs by pushing electric power into a surplus.

Personally I horde my electric power in case there is an economic crisis, like the one a month or two ago. Electric power production was in a death spiral and the world needed an injection of power to keep at least some factories working, not to mention what is also consumed by C3s and player countries.

This is also not limited to electric power. I contract most of my oil and gas production to my enterprises. This prevents oil and gas from going into a surplus because at one point I did overproduce them and cause that scenario. Now I just sell them off every once in a while and during economic crises.

No, you are definately not stupied but with more wind farms being constructed, and electric power use quite stable, there is a chance of a steady increase in production.

The chance of oversupply might be small but the potential damage to countries with too many wind farms is too large to ignore the slight chance it might happen.

Your response on the other thread when this came up is jumbled and didn't actually touch on any of the discussion points that I tried to make, so I'm not sure how to better communicate with you. Could you please go re-read through my last response in the thread in the problems section and actually respond to any of it? You brought up wind farm bankruptcy again like that's the guiding beacon in you decision making, and I addressed that without response in the other thread. I know it sounds like I'm just railing on you and complaining for the sake of complaining, but I really am just trying to have discussion on issues in the game and how to best approach them.

It honestly feels like you don't actually read through the full thoughts that others give. That is unfortunate and I've seen instances on this forum where that behavior has pushed veteran players out the door and cost w3creative revenue.

If you don't think the issues people like myself bring up are legit issues or you think possible solutions that people bring up are outlandish, articulate that in a way that actually addresses what they have to say. The other week I brought up that Wind Farm income reported on the Financial Index wasn't true value with quality considered while government costs do have quality considered which leads to an inaccurate financial index which potentially limits the player's game level. You just gave a brief 'we don't see an issue' response that didn't even attempt to put in any effort beyond a shoulder shrug.

I came back about two months ago. At the time, everything on the forum and in game announcements indicated that building many wind farms was a good idea. Wind farms were profitable, and the players who were doing it were making great amounts of game cash. In short amounts of time, big wind farmers can become the wealthiest players in the game. I can't find any posts with any warnings about building too many from this time or before. Wind farms had been around many months.

Everything W3C had shown me lead me to believe this was the way forward. The only drawback was the financial index, and even the problems with that were removed since I've been back. I commented publicly on one of these threads that players SHOULD BUY MAXIMUM POSSIBLE based off how good wind farms were in the game system. From a profitability point of view, this had always been the case - and again, this looks like it was the case for many many months with no issues or warnings.

It feels like the GMs may not have realized potential issues with mass wind farms or may not have realized players would buy many of them until very recently (though I wonder why). The GMs now see potential issues after players bought the new feature that's being promoted and that's taking most of the dev time. The GMs suddenly started increasing the costs to wind farms, announced wind turbine limitations to wind farms, and now are publicly warning against too many wind farms. This comes *after* players have purchased thousands of wind farms. Wind farms are extremely expensive and players who've invested the most are now going to have the most problems with the new limitations.

Although it's coming late in the development process, I do not mind the concept of adding limitations to how many farms a country can have, especially if it's based off population. That said, it'd seem like a good idea to have a "dismount" or "exit" option for players with many wind farms. I imagine the majority of wind farms are held by a small group of players who more or less impact the entire market. If you wish we had less farms, can we SELL them - even if at a discount? Wind farms also cause problems for countries that go inactive - with large amounts of farms bankrupting the countries when the electric power isn't sold.

I know there is an option to email the gms to remove wind farms, but that's not a good solution in my opinion, and isn't sustainable. I don't want to send an email requiring you to work on my countries when you could instead be working on game developments or other more important things.

What Andy is trying to say is, players have built / are building, an extreme number of wind farms, far more than he expected when he developed the feature.

There is a serious risk that wind farms will end up producing far more electric power than the worlds can possibly consume. Making it impossible to sell the electric power on the open market.

The feature was likely developed with the idea that people would mostly try to be self sufficient with their electricity production. The scale of wind farms being used to produce power for sale on the open market has vastly exceeded Andy's expectations, risking massive market destabilization and country bankruptcy.

Please be careful when building wind farms, the market for electric power may crash, and you may be unable to sell the electric power on the world markets. As such it's very risky to depend on the money from selling wind power on the global market.

Andy's been clear in his many posts about wind farms. I haven't been confused, though I won't speak for others.

My point is that when a feature with the potential to create vast wealth for players is introduced, you shouldn't be surprised that players use it. Players were always going to use it like this. This feature is many months old, and players have had thousands of wind farms for a long time - so it's not like this has been a secret. Some players have accumulated *many* quintillions from this. I am just surprised that it sounds like they didn't anticipate players using the feature to make money at scale until recently.

If there is a feature built into the game, don't ask nicely for someone to use it how you hope it's going to be used. It won't work.

You have to build a feature that works as intended, or improve it until it works as intended. Otherwise, players will use it how they like. The buttons exist, and they can be clicked. It sounds like Andy and company are searching for a solution to the potential oversupply. This is why I am ok with ideas like putting a limit on wind farms relative to country population size, and have requested a sell wind farms option.

What ideas do you have?

I have no idea how it would come as a surprise that players would flock to the wind industry. It's been popular to the point that the limit a country could have has been raised multiple times.

The feature was developed initially as a precursor to an update that introduced pollution or global warming or some such. I can't remember the specifics of the posting, but if I'm not mistaken their initial intent was to reduce the reliance on Oil, which became impossible to keep up with demand for since natural resources were shifted around to their current build limitations while promising a future implemented system around climate change with wind farms providing a positive benefit to the country as a clean energy source.

Eventually supply and demand will catch up as it does with all other products, but that point is still a good ways away. It's impossible to know exactly how many wind farms the major producers have, but on the 5 core worlds Electric Power supply is still ~ 1/4 demand with thousands of Electric Power companies churning out power. The most popular planet, WG, is over 750 million EP in shortage and there are over 6,000 EP corporations on the planet.

The problem with Wind Farms that has brought up all of these other issues is that in practice, the Wind Farms have become a 'if you're not making this you're wrong'. It sucks to say but it's true. I personally have forsaken any other growth besides wind power. If supply ever catches up to demand it is unfortunate but then you just realign your corporations as you do for any other product. Break the math down and it's foolish to build anything else.

For the sake of quick math I'm going to ignore the initial investment cost of purchasing a Wind Farm for your country, because that cost pays itself off in 11-39 days depending on your EP quality. This will focus just on the money making potential of individual corporations themselves.

Pick any corporation and check its monthly profits. Oil is a popular one, solid profits around 2.5-3.0B per month. Great return on investment.

Now lets take a Wind Turbine corporation in a country with farms. Again, the farms are a one time investment cost that is not insignificant but is quickly recovered. A Wind Turbine corporation pulls around 3.5-4.5B profit per month. But now let's take it a step further and contract those Wind Turbines produced to our own country. Wind Farms consume 1 Wind Turbine per month, and a WT corp produces 20 @ 100% production. So On top of its profit from cost to produce the turbines, that 1 Wind Turbine corp is in essence producing 1250 x 20 -> 25000 Electric Power each month when contracted to your country. That means that Wind Turbine corp is actually producing an extra 7.7B @ 120Q EP, or a whopping 27.4B extra @ 330Q EP (before cost of WT consumption, which is only 3.6B @ 120Q). And that can all be accomplished with the Wind Turbine corp buying minimum quality supplies with no production quality upgrades.

One corporation type was introduced that can make roughly 10x one of the most profitable corps with the same amount of workers and without any need for supplies or quality output over minimum. And it was actively promoted with the cap on farms raised repeatedly.

Andy,

Simple suggestion,
Why not just add a function to destroy windfarms like "Roads, Rails, or Water treatment plants".

If I can close my windfarms just like other government builds then it fixes the problem of bankruptcy, gives players more controls, and if overbuilding occurs let the problem be fixed quickly rather then you scrambling to fix a massive economic issue

On a side note, I'm happy that i can build my targon defense, got my first one in place, in Project 3 on LU, thank you

Please please please build wind farms in any country you have,
Wind farms are excellent for the country.
They make much more money that they cost in maintenance.
They generate industrial production, create many jobs and improve the finances of the country.

We hope that many players will build wind farms and reduce their dependency on the Gas/Oil electric power generators. We will add an energy page to countries and hope that they will come to the conclusion that wind farms help them to become energy independent.

We did not change our mind about wind farms at all but as said here by some, a very small number of players went into wind energy, full force and triggered our warning that although we think that wind power is an excellent proposition, they might overdo it.

we also warned players in the past, who increased the size of their empires to an absurd number of countries.
we allowed for large empires but we do not think it is a good idea to build very very large empires.

We hope that many countries will build wind farms.
we think that the main target when building them, will be to reduce the need to purchase electric power on the market or use power that is generated by use of gas/oil.

There is no game wide problem with wind farms at all.
there are several players who now have or want to have huge numbers of them and bumped or may bump into the problem of maintaining them.

The use of one wind turbines in the maintenance of wind farms, was there form the start.

If you insist on very large numbers, buy wind turbines in many countries and move them to the one country where you need them.
we keep advising to limit the numbers. we think that there is a long term risk in the price of electric power. If you have a smaller number and you produce for your own use, the risk is much smaller.

Supersoldier

we currently have no function to remove wind farms.
we said several times that such a function will be added.
In the mean time, we offered to remove wind farms for you if you ask us to do so.

In te entire period, we had 2 cases when players asked to remove wind farms and we did.
This was at the time when the income did not land in visible income for the country.
In the past weeks, there were no such requests.

so this removal function should be added but to date, the number of users for this function is zero. no one wants to remove them. It is not very urgent and we have some issues we want to resolve before.

Andy,

Thank you stating that, Honest I do not check the forums much anymore and I might have missed those comments.

We now have one request to remove wind farms.