W3C - Game News October 2

Birth rate

More small increases to the birth rate are installed today.
the objective is to tune up the numbers and support a better age distribution.

We think that these changes will help increase the numbers in the population in the younger groups and reduce the weight of the older groups.

the changes are not large and will take some time to take hold.

Corporate size

Slight changes in some types of corporations will make them hire a bit more.
The profitability of corporations will not be affected.

Recently, on two of our worlds, the number of corporations passed a critical mile stone that could have adverse effect on performance.
Slightly increasing sizes will slow down this trend.

changes are small.

Cool. I believe that is the solution; is work on birth rates as that seems to be what effects the large countries. Small countrys are doing fine, just some of my larger ones still see some loss, not as bad but still not good. With better births that should slow things down.

Also just a note hopefully not TOO much more, i would suggest reducing medium level workers in fact. Other then that i would not mind. Corps seriously need too many medium level works over all the rest

Andy,

Thanks for the update. With the changes in Corporation hiring, was if only for unskilled "worker" categories. Or was it across all skill types? As this will effect the overall balance of Education index and priorities.

Presidents of Simcountry,

Another change I noticed with this update was an increase in the death rate for older age groups. So if you're noticing your death rate spiked, and your older citizens are dying. That is why it's happening.

Also with changing population age distribution, you may have to adjust your education priorities.
Senior Doctors, Executives, and High Tech Executives. All use mainly older workers, so will likely need higher priorities as the population gets younger.
Meanwhile, Nurses, use mainly younger workers, so you may experience a glut if you haven't updated your priorities.
What's more, with more children, you'll need a lot more schools and Universities, so raising Teacher and University Teacher priorities might be needed.

Signed President of DanNation on LU

Andy,

Building on Daniels post, can the GM consider building up the effect of education or something to combat Low Level workers? I have countries with well over 200+ educational index's and yet I have over 8 million Low Level Workers and growing. Its impossible to keep the numbers low and because of the millions of unemployed its killing my employment index, which is forcing my country to build more corps even though I have none of the other worker types. The issue is creating a self filling prophecy.

I know its one task after another for the GM regarding this population issue and I appreciate the hard work you have been putting into the issue. I only ask that maybe a tweak can be made to make Low level workers less problematic or increase the strength of the education index before you next update in 2 weeks. As population is growing maybe its time to increase the power the educational index has.

I definitely agree with SuperSoldier post. Of course, only if it is possible among all other DM's activities going on...

Super Soldier,

I have started a vote about a week before I made a new account due to very high Low Level Workers problem so have a look at the vote and vote yes if you agree to transfer LLW to other professions ok.

Thanks.

Andy, Supersoilder,

Oh, I thought my education index was just to low. I'm approaching 170 Education Index right now, and I'm drowning in those poor unemployed Low Level Workers. I was going to stop increasing it at 180... I guess I'll keep going to 200, or until I finally make a dent in the LLW unemployment rate.

Signed President of DanNation on LU

The main change recently is the increase in the birth rates and it resulted in more available workers.

I saw it in the countries we use to test but it is receding as we added new corporations and LLWs are being converted to MLWs and HLWs each game month. It can reach 1.5 million a day. (real day).

Death rates and birth rates did not settle yet but the process is nearing its end.

More good news is that you will end up with population that is younger, smaller numbers of very old people and lower social security cost.

We do not think we are there yet.
if we stop now, countries with very high population will fall back but much less than before.

We will have some more changes in birth and death rates but these will be small and it will end shortly.
I plan to end all tweaks in one week.

We will then leave it alone for some time (two weeks) and see where it goes.
It is very very hard to predict. the formulas are impossible to reverse engineer based on the numbers. There are too many parameters.

Andy,

Thank you for the information. Your communication is extremely valuable to us.

Currently I'm expericing something interesting with the population growth numbers...

In DanNation on LU, as of Sep 14 4135.
Expected Number of Births This Year 1,154,266
Expected Number of Deaths This Year 590,813
For a annual net growth of 563,453
Divide by 12 to get a monthly estimate of 46,954
However the ticker at the top of the screen shows monthly growth of 91,656

This seems to be consistent, with actual growth being double what the Births-Deaths numbers would suggest. Is this a temporary boost in growth? Or are the Births/Deaths numbers wrong? Meaning we'll be growing at double speed forever?

PS. I don't use worker transfers, and have 0 Migration, so that is not the cause of the discrepancy.

Signed President of DanNation on LU

Andy,

Since we are on the topic of healthcare and population updates would it possible to get the GM to reformat the index calculator(for healthcare only)?

For example...
If I need 100 schools and I have 200, My education index is 200
If I need 100 roads and I have 200, my transportation index is 200

Right now the healthcare index is becoming vital to success and the way it calculates the numbers is WAY off and confusing. Right now no countries healthcare index matches the way the other index's are calculated.
In one country I have 4200 hospitals when I only need 1897. Based on the other index's I should have 221 healthcare index, but its only ranked at 188.

I think the GM should consider this change because not only will it help players adjust and properly plan their healthcare in the future, but it will also provide higher index's which helps with pop growth, and for those of us that play and econ game it will make leveling up more practical.

Daniel,

The numbers will become more consistent as we move on.
currently there are temporary factors involved.

What you should in fact look at now is the number of births each year.
It should grow in most countries.

The number of births each year is added to the 0-4 years old group
and 25% of that group is moving to the 4-8 years old group each year.

You can easily compute the monthly numbers.
which one is larger?

The number of death each year will be erratic in the coming weeks.
Later it will stabilize and the percentage of older people in the country should end up at a lower level than before all this started.

Average age declined recently and will also end up lower than before.

Life expectancy is now at correct levels.

SuperSoldier

Indexes do not grow linearly.
Spending twice on education or health does not necessarily make them twice as good. There are limits.

so they grow faster at lower levels and a bit slower at higher levels.
not "way off".

At some point, death rates could go to zero. This should not be done by just adding some hospitals. It should be very very expensive, and in fact impossible.

I'm still seeing a problem with life expectancies:

My country Pomerania shows a life expectancy of 211 and still rising
My country Cornish Republic show a life expectancy of 173 and still rising.

Both are on LU and have health indexes between 110 and 115. Both are also still show a rising average age. Birth rates are still around 5 times the death rate even though I've allowed the health index to slowly drop.

Andy,

I fully understand and agree that it shouldn't be possible for a zero. However if you look at education or transportation it's easy to manage those indexes to understand where they are.

With education Transportation if you have twice as many roads or twice as many schools the indexes 200. I guess more than anything what I'm asking for is kind of two things maybe a clarification on how you balance the healthcare index. For those of us that try to reach a certain index number it's very frustrating not to know how you calculate that index. Second as the game has been growing and you have made tremendous additions to the game so don't think I'm not acknowledging those but if you're trying to build higher index is especially for the Econ game you guys want 200 + indexes which are very unreasonable. I regularly helping train new players and a lot of them want to play the economic game but they feel very stagnant it cuz the indexes are very rigid.

I'm just asking for more clarification cuz as you guys are growing the game and you're doing a great job at helping to facilitate larger countries hospitals do use a very considerable amount of workers so even to make those hundred levels and higher countries is just extremely costly just for the base amount. Having that indexed tweaked, Maybe a slight reduction in the amount of staff that's needed, or even just some form of clarification on how the indexes are calculated I think would go a long way to helping the player base.

ferdhelke,

I looked into the country.
you are right.

The measures we took to improve the distribution of the population are overshooting in countries with small population.
this is true for most free accounts.
We let it happen because it is very complex to tune and the effects are positive for these countries.
in fact too positive.

The procedure is starting to fade away.
I already saw that the numbers are starting to change.
life expectancy will start to fall (check the graph) and population will return to the 20M limit.

This will take some time but you will see it becoming more "normal" in the coming two weeks.

SuperSoldier,

The increase of the non linear indexes is slightly less than linear.
the difference is not a major factor.

If you record the numbers yourself, you will be able to largely reverse engineer the formula.
There are many thousands formulas in everything in the game.

Instead of starting to publish formulas one for one when players ask for it, we encourage them to have a good look at the numbers, think about it and figure out how to act instead of trivializing the entire model.

The changes in the birth and death rates where needed because the initial model was built for lower population numbers.

Also these formulas should not be published and left for players to discuss, discover and optimize their own game.

Andy, thanks for the response. I'm just hoping I don't see my retired workers rise to 9% of my population again before it starts easing. The high retired percentage does raise havoc with social security costs. I'll keep a close eye on it for the next couple weeks.

haha.
You have close to none.
the number will grow but will end up lower than it has been before we started these changes.

Andy I share your laughter

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Ferdhelke,

No disrepect, but what are you talking about? I just checked out nation you only have 1% of your population retired! Thats virtually nothing. The real life global average is 15-20% depending on the survey numbers used. You are so far below that number your costs are nothing. I did the numbers for you you pay 260M a month in retirement and 1B in unemployment. Your unemployment is whats costing you, not your retired population.

Hi GUYS

This is a side effect in some countries.
Obviously it will not stay this way and will in time return to normal.

in the mean time, enjoy the low cost.

SuperSoldier,

When my retired pop was 9%, social security cost were much higher. They look ok now, but a return to the 9% level would eat away at least half of my current country profits. When retired people dropped profits went up. Unemployment fluctuates, where as retired people take time for the rates to change. Once they get high, they take longer to bring back down while unemployment costs can be fixed much sooner. I will take a closer look at the unemployment numbers.