OK, this has GOT to be manipulation?

...or a bug.

I happen to have a corp that produces cotton. The price has been fairly constant untill now, but now it plummeted.

So what happened?

Well, looking at the supply screen I see that the supply of cotton jumped from about 50 million to 280 million IN ONE MONTH!

Since each cotton plant produces barely 1 million tons, this means that MORE THAN 200 COTTON CORPORATIONS WERE OPENED IN ONE MONTH!?!?!?

This commodity was never particularily profitable so there's no chance any players would - in the same month - get the idea to open that many cotton plants.

So what is it? A massive auto-creation of cotton plants or a major bug?

No.
A player decided to sell.
motives:

- made a lot of money on it.
- tries to manipulate the market. (and it works).
- many other reasons, most of them are motivated by trying to make money.

This happens all the time with many products.
check the utilization page. many products are supplied at more than 100%.
the industry produces 100% the rest comes from selling by players.

The system intervenes in a generally predictable manner. It won't supply an oversupplied market. It'll generally create products when there is an extremely large demand, and even then, not enough to completely fill demand. (Observed with Sulfur a long time ago.) Not sure whether it buys products.

Well if that's the case, it's perfectly OK ofc.

But Andy, you're saying that someone saved up 1B tons of cotton to dump on the market during 5 months?

Because it's still up there at 400% supply (though declining).

And I thought massive stocks weren't allowed anymore? I seem to remember having read that the game intervenes with it, doesn't it?

I've encountered nothing that leads me to believe they've imposed a limitation on stockpiles. Game news references corporate stockpiles (unsold products in a corporation), which is another thing entirely.

The automatic buying of products you use in the country has it limits in the number of months you can set.

however, both countries and enterprises can place manual orders for very large amounts of products.
This may include products that are not used by the population.
the limitation is in the spending space per game month.

1B tons of anything might be too much for a single purchase but could be done during a longer period.

oops.
there are cases when we might cause this.

1. In case the country is nearly bankrupt. Max loans is reached and cash is deep negative, then products might be sold on the market to prevent the country from going down.

2. When a country is cancelled, or an enterprise, their strategic stocks are sold. otherwise, this could be a great way to manipulate the markets. start a country, purchase lots of products and cause the price to increase, then drop the country and have the products dissipate. This would not be good for the stability of the markets.

Most sudden increases in product supplies come from countries. we have checked it in the past. and recently there were lots of weapons on the market.

Andy

I just had a resent issue you need to check into on KB indrusties(my CEO), I sold 80M units of power @ 292Q which is valued at 23T. I got only 7.5T which is what it costs at less then 120Q.

Can you investigate this and if possible can I get the remainder of my money sent to my ceo

Could it have been a result that somebody saw the price at an all time low and bought say 150million manually. And decided to unload it, to make money on the change of market price?

Super, that's a longstanding issue with selling products from your stock to the world market. You get paid for the products based on the market price without quality effects. I've always assumed this was intentional on the part of the Gamemaster.

Returning to the cotton market, there was a simulataneous decline in number of producers. So it could, in fact, have been a corporation that was eliminated by the game.

For the record, I don't find anything wrong in stocking up on goods and booming them on the market. It will heavily impact prices ofc., but I think such a trading strategy will hardly be good for your economy as a whole.

It does lead me to wonder if market prices are determined ex-post or not? If they are ex-post, then you can flood a market with big rewards ofc. But if they are simulataneous, flooding would do no good.

When a market is oversupplied in such a manner, corporations owned by the gamemaster (in the form of corporations owned by C3s) generally tend close in response. The oversupply is the cause and the closing is the effect rather than the other way around.

I observed this when I built a ton of spice corporations (I built way past the amount needed to produce for the entire world market). Other spice corporations decreased rapidly to the point where it was apparent that the corporations remaining were all owned by players: the reason for this conclusion is that player owned corporations will not automatically close from debt. Instead, they will continue leeching money from the parent country/enterprise until kingdom come or the player manually closes them. As far as I know, gamemaster corporations do not behave this way.

It is important to note that if the corporation in question is "making an attempt" to sell its products, meaning a player hasn't specifically ordered the corporation NOT to sell it's good, then the goods will generally be sold within 6 months (I believe the system just tries to get rid of them at "clearance rates" at this point)... meaning the corporation usually won't be overstocked anywhere approaching those numbers. There should be a game news referencing this system, not sure how old it is.

This is an opinion, but it seems as though many "small market" products - those products which a small percentage of the total number of corporations on the planet are needed to supply the world economy - are prioritized by the automatic system of C3 countries... presumably in order to prevent the market from shorting in any of these sectors from player neglect.

I don't know what you mean by ex-post, but I figure the way it works is that market price is determined for the month based on whether the previous month had a surplus or shortage. I believe there may be some maximum and or minimum (if not an outright set ratio of base price and/or current price that it changes according to). I haven't observed anything that leads me to believe it is more than a simple check to see whether it moves up or down - even if the amount it moves up and down may be based on other factors. Anyway, for sure there is a maximum ratio that market price can change by to prevent massive changes in price occurring over a game month. Of course, this is speculation and may prove to be inaccurate. If you figure this is worth investigating, more power to you.

Generally speaking, it is not a good idea to buy products then sell to the market as per what Super noted. The minimum purchase quality is 120 and selling from the country/enterprise stock to the market ignores these quality effects. Meaning you'd need to make up the 20 quality points with the higher sale price and then some. Additionally, "flooding" the market is not good because the market price falls relatively quickly in comparison to the the rate at which the products will generally sell in a "flooded" market. Of course larger markets are more or less immune from these effects unless you dedicate trillions upon trillions to getting a stockpile that can realistically "flood" the market.

I just want my 13T...

No one buys stocks for 100 per share
Sells when its 300 per share
---AND--- is told they only make 70 per share...
They make less then 2/3 of what they bought it for even though its 3 times the cost.

Yes, Mizore. By ex-post I mean exactly what you describe: the price is determined by the S/D balance the previous month.

I don't know if that is how the game works, but if it does, it's a mistake. In a perfect market, the price should be set to what clears the market in the current situation. History shouldn't be used as default.

As far as closed cooperations goes, I think Andy was refering to player-controlled countries that are closed down because a nation goes bankrupt or something. In that process - apparantly - the stock is sold off to clear the debts (or is that only if the nation isn't bankrup`?)

And I was thinking of the 6 month limit too. That's what's mentioned in the documentation, but curoiously not by Andy.

But broccoli automatic buying/selling/MV changes/IF orders/building of corps all happen at a specific time. You won't one investment fund buy on the 4th and another start buying on the 26th automatically. So it is relatively real time action in regards to the way the market works. It's kind of like the market is open for 1 millisecond a month and then closes to the next month. Oh shoot I confused myself. So umm... at the time all decisions are made the market is fresh. The only thing susceptible to an outdated system are those decisions made by individuals which are a very small amount of the transactions that happen.

So in this situation the price is set as products flooded the market. They couldn't very well account for something they didn't know was going to happen. Not to mention my observations support price variation based soley on the whether the market is in shortage or surplus not the extremity of the move away from equilibrium. And so none of this would actually have an impact you had a corp you shouldn't have had, and now you really shouldn't have it. But I'm not here to argue just I think what you are hoping for is someone to agree with you that things should be determined by future situations and that is impossible.

You guys keep flooding the market, go ahead. It means I can buy cheap. Ok, sometimes it effects my corps profits, but I can make up for it by selling cheap to corps. Every cloud has a silver lining!

Gamemaster corporations behave in exactly the same way as other corporations.
there are no different rules for closing.

selling from country stock does take quality into account.

The latter part was nice to know. And it's probably wise to keep it that way because it means we can counter these kinds of sudden dumps on the market (provided one has the cash to stomach it...).

Allthough this price dip was kind of a shock for one of my corporations, I must say I think it's a good thing that the market can actually change that much. In most comodities it's just the usual sawtooth around very small changes.

Cotton price has now fallen for 12 consequtive months and there's obviously a backlog because the supply is still the double of the previous level.

What is odd, though, is that demand also fell by 25%, but ofc. that could be accidental (perhaps not. If some country or enterprise was closed down, it might have had as well cotton production as corporations that used cotton...).

Still wondering

Why did i sell 292Q power (worth 20T) and only get 7T?

Thats really got me pissed. I spent how long buying my own nuke power thinking id make a profit when the market rebounds instead i make a loss...

Andy is this getting fixed?, should i even bother to keep asking for the 13T i should have made?

Pfft. be lucky you gots the 7T! Accept it and LIKE IT!!! :P j/k How are you doing, Ryan? Dun see you too much any more.

Andy, country/enterprise stock to the world market does not take quality into account. This is precisely the behavior I, and others, have observed in the game. I'm going to continue operating under the information I have at my disposal. I trust cash flow more than your word.

Besides I'm not saying selling from the country stock to corporations or via direct trade doesn't take into account quality because I've observed that it does. Everything else, I don't have enough information to say for sure, bur for selling from country/enterprise stock to the world market... I've seen that it doesn't take into account quality so in absence of a successful sale at market price * quality in this situation, I will continue to operate under this assumption unless I see otherwise.

For gamemaster corporations (the ones in C3 countries):

<!-Quote-!>Quote:

218. Managing Corporations in C3 Countries [ top ]

Failing corporations in C3 countries that are unable to sell their products for several game months because of oversupply of the products on the market are now closed and replaced by corporations that produce products with market shortages. The measure will slightly improve the product balance on the markets but is not expected to cause a massive replacement of corporations.<!-/Quote-!>

Maybe here I just didn't explain what I meant well enough?

sup, i'm with you, its irritating that just as soon as you buy something, its value declines, because you can not resell it for what you payed. kinda anyway.

but i wouldn't really recommend pulling that thread. they are already wading through the swamp with butterfly nets, and faerie spray.

I care I would like fair value

and my 13T owed

just because I played my cards right don't mean I should be punished

shrug

Ryan, you want me to slap Josias for that shrug??? I'd be more than happy to!!! Nothing would give me greater pleasure!!! :P ha ha ha ha

Re Josias: "...its irritating that just as soon as you buy something, its value declines, because you can not resell it for what you payed...."

Just like buying a new car in real life!!! It's value declines before you even pull it off the car lot. :P