W3C - Next Update April 15

Simcountry databases are approaching high values in recent months.

Increase in the size of the population and a major increase in the number of corporations are pushing some databases to limits and may require major development effort to resolve the problem. we can prevent this from taking place.

Some of the factors include the population of countries without a president which increased recently despite the 20M limit to higher levels. We are now returning these countries to their limits.
It will reduce game wide population by 80 Billion.

Another factor is the number of corporations, per world and per country. It has increased to levels we have never seen before.

To keep the situation under control, we will slightly increase the size of corporations and reduce the need to create many more.

The number of corporations rose to about 900.000 before it started declining. processing 900.000 corporations and their transactions, (many each game month), 6 times a day involved many many millions of transactions and the numbers were increasing.

The next update will have 3 types of corporations increase in size by about 10%. These are Services corporations, high tech services and construction.

The larger corporations will hire more workers, use more materials, produce more products and can make more profit.

Some other corporations will see much smaller changes and most corporations will not increase in size at all.


Large countries may see employment rise by more than 1.000.000 or the equivalent of 5 corporations.
for smaller countries, the effect will be considerably smaller.

Kudos on that last point.

Hi Andy,

I think most people would agree to have less game month per real day and less but bigger/more profitable corporations. that would help to reduce number of transactions and data your databases are facing.

Andy,

"The larger corporations will hire more workers, use more materials, produce more products and can make more profit."

Very good. I was worried that if only the workforce requirements were increased, it could lead to product shortages. So long as the production of Corporations increases in-line with workforce numbers, I'm all for the change.

If you are looking for more corp types to increase in size. There are huge numbers of Electric Power, Factory Maintenance, Oil, Chemicals, and Household Products Corporations. If they were bigger, and produced more, then we wouldn't have to build so many of them in every nation, in order to produce what we need.

Lord Mndz,

You would be wrong. I would hate to have the game slowed down. However, I would be happy with having fewer, but larger and more productive corporations. At the moment there is a lot of duplication. ie people having several Corps producing the same product. This doesn't add anything to the game, it would be better to have fewer Corps producing more per Corp. That way the servers will have less stress, and it will be easier for players to manage.

Signed President of DanNation on LU

Changes will be proportional and the profit profile will increase proportionally too.
I am not talking much larger corporations but this will be a trend to try and reduce the need for so many corporations which are also harder to manage.

We had it years ago when servers were slower. Now it is more in the database than in computing power.

Andy,

Thanks Andy, I'm glad you're taking the time to communicate with us, and tell us about upcoming changes, it means a lot to us

Signed President of DanNation on LU

I can live with 2 or even 1 game month per day. I really don't see any difference if you get the same profit per real day. Daniel, what is the difference that you see? buying/building/growing can also be adjusted easily.

Lord Mndz,

To me, it's the exact opposite. It's not about making X number of $ profit each day.

Instead it's about developing the nation over time. Watching it's demographics change, it's lifespans extend as you build new hospitals. It's army grow as you gradually set up the defence of your country. Upgrading and changing the focus and balance of your industry. Shifting the education balance and watching the changes to your population's career prospects. Managing the investment fund. Analysing the changing markets.

All of that is largely limited by game time speed, not just raw profit. If the game were slower, I'd have so little to do. It is already pretty slow as it is. It can take real life weeks to fully upgrade a Corporation.

Then there is education balance. At a maximum working life of 50 game years, from 15-65. At the current rate of 6 game months per day, it takes 100 real life days, for a shift in your education priorities and education index to reach it's full effect, filtering through the workforce. 100 days to feel the full effect of a change is an extremely long time.

Or raising the healthcare index. At a lifespan of 80 game years, it takes 160 real life days for a change in your births and deaths, to filter through to all age groups.

Taking 100-160 days to see the effects of your changes is an incredibly slow process. Any slower would prevent players from ever seeing the long term effects of their actions, because it would take a real life year, just to see the end point of a single adjustment.

If anything, the game could benefit from more game months per real life day, not fewer.

Signed President of DanNation on LU

With these changes coming Andy, can we temporarily disable the limit of closing 3 corporations per game month? I imagine people will need to close some of these corps when their workforce doubles.

Daniel,

I don't know if you ever tried playing Civilization game. If so the most interesting game mode is when you play "marathon". Some things are developing much slower, but you use that time to fight, to better micromanage your empire etc. Now in SC you cannot adjust game settings for every game months/turns. I have a work and kids, so I can only join once a day which means I make changes to 1/6 of game months. If I am able to make changes every game months that would be very much different path of development my country would have.

I remember playing this game when FB had 2 or 3 game monts per day and nobody was complaining about it. Then W3C increased number of game months but reduced other things to have it compensated so it can be made the same way back.

I am with daniel

I want to make money. But to me it is about building a good country/empire. Increasing health and education. Building corps to trade internialy with(common market score). Increasing wages when can afford to(increase welfare).

I don't think we need more game months per day(can't keep up as it is). But don't need as few as 1 or 2 either. That would take to long to build up score.

I strong disagree with Lord Mndz,

Slower worlds are NOT better. In the past we had planets running 3, 4, and 6 months per day. Players hated the longer wait times as in comparison to most simulation games SC already runs at a slower place. That's why all worlds where changed to 6 months per day to make them more uniform. In honesty in some areas the game is outdated and slowing the rate of change would drive more people away as its what drove some people away in the first place and as a long time player can say it would be MUCH more harmful. This fact is compounded in war. The GM has made changes to the war game and with blackout times, supply units, deployment times even a small change in the game months per day lets say from 6 to 4 would require a HOST of changes far past anything we've seen in recent updates.

One thing the GM should consider is snycing worlds. Right now the plants all run random and scattered times.
FB and LU should sync and hit the 1st of (game month) at 12AM
KB syncs and hits the 1st of (game month) at 1AM
GR syncs and hits the 1st of (game month) at 2AM
WG syncs and hits the 1st of (game month) at 3AM
Then at 4AM FB and LU re-sync to the next game month.

This still allows the 6 game months per day, but also provides uniformed times. This should allow more processing between worlds and I believe help the GM computing power.

Andy,

Thanks for the update on the next update! Sounds like you guys will need to be expanding your servers soon.

If possible, I'd like to make a few suggestions that might also help the next update. These are just simple suggestions similar to like when I suggested adding trucks to certain corporations. I provided the suggestions, additions, and reductions below. None of them effect the income/costs of the corporations and allow greater diversity of products allowing better markets.

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---Cable TV---
Currently they do not use Shows or Sports as they are only used by countries. Having TV consume these products would result in multiple consumption processes instead of Shows and Sports only being used by countries. My suggestion is to first increase the base price from $910 to $915. Based on a 9.6 million unit standard production this is a yearly increase of $48million per year. To off set that they should begin consuming 25,000 units of Sports and 20,000 units of Shows. Sports base price is $910 per unit meaning 25,000 units will cost $22.75M and Shows base price is $940 per unit meaning 20,000 units will cost $18.8M for a grand total of $41.55M in additional costs and $48M profit. This will result in roughly less them $10M in additional profit for the corporation as a whole which is barely noticeable. This however will result in new demand which would only need 30 sports and shows corps per 1,000 Cable TV services. More importantly it would give some products additional consumption process

---Telephone---
According to my numbers countries use roughly 1 unit per 175(ish) people based on country use. I suggest adding Telephone Services to Services, Military Services, and Construction(possibly more in the future). Again giving this corporation multiple uses. I would suggest based on my numbers adding the use of 1,000 units of telephone per month to the consumption process. Based on the base price of $1,000 per unit this would cost $12M per year. Since your looking at changing these corps I don't see a need to increase prices or the production process any further. However, this simple addition would add the need for 1-2 telephone companies per 1,000 corporations of these types. Based on LU as of now there are slightly under 5,000 combined corporations of these types meaning that demand for telephones would increase 5-8 corporations worth of demand.

---Vacation---
I would suggest adding food products to the production process. This is complicated and all the math and numbers are below.

I suggest reducing air trans(which is always in the red). I suggest reducing air trans from 375,000 to 300,000 units per month. This would reduce air trans global demand by roughly 75 million units per month per 1,000 vacation corps. This is roughly 70 corps of air trans, but keep in mind this sector is always in huge demand and you would only be reducing the demand for a market that's one of the deepest "red" markets in the game. The total cost of the removed air trans would equal $55.5million per month.
My suggestion is that Vacation now consume: 4000 units of Chocolate, 2500 units Other Food products, 2000 units of Meat Products, and 2500 units of Wine

Chocolate - $3650(base price) times 4000 units = $14.6M
Other Food products - $4950(base price) times 2500 units Other Food products = $12.3M
Meat Products - $7510(base price) times 2000 units of Meat Products = $15M
Wine - $5210 (base price) times 2500 units of wine = $13M

Based on these numbers you can see they will cost not increase the costs of the corporation itself but according to these new numbers for ever 1,000 Vacation corps the demand of 20 Chocolate, 17 Other Food Products, 20 Meat Products, and 20 Wine will be created. I choose these corporations in particular because of the bleed effect. All these corporations use several other food or agricultural corporations in there production processes and adding these corps will require more food corporations as a byproduct.

---Increasing food consumption---

Food markets are almost always in the green or producing barely any income because of mass volatility. My suggestion is to increase food consumption by 5% in all nations while at the same time decreasing the consumption of electrical power. There is over 6,000 electrical power corps in LU(and many other worlds) The markets are always in the red and almost even seem to break even. I suggest slightly lowering demand to allow it to equalize and shifting that demand to other area of the game with lessor demand.
I've done the math in several nations reducing power consumption by 10% and increasing food consumption by 5% will cost a nation slightly more a month( even in my biggest near 300 million nation the costs was roughly 3 billion more a month in costs and I consume 300Q goods) so for smaller players the costs are barely noticeable if even existent. However, this would shift corporations from the Power and Oil sectors which are already always massive in the red and shift many corporations into the food sector allowing more of these corps to be built and more dynamic markets

Also Andy,

Can we please allow Countries to store Space shuttles??? Asset maintenance corps are struggling to get shuttles because of CRAZY demand and Shuttles always shift to your account can something be done to allow countries to store shuttles so we can sell them to state corps that need them?

Andy, Jonni, GMs, SupersoldierRCP,

I agree with SuperSoildierRCP. The suggested changes constitute improvements in the balance of Simcountry's Markets and economy.

Sport and Shows fits perfectly into the role of Cable TV.

Telephone is currently an underrepresented utility, considering how important it is in real life.

Food needs increased consumption, it's often in a country's best interests to simply not produce food in Simcountry. That is very unrealistic. Since nearly every country on earth produces at least some type of food.

If the GM doesn't have any reason why these ideas would cause a problem. I would be happy to see them implemented.

Signed President of DanNation on LU