From a9fc8yt3kd1:
#1: I agree with Crafty completely. The game shouldn't even set a base price for any commodity. All prices of all commodities should be set solely by the market forces of supply and demand. No more socialism!
#2: I understand the logic of a national debt limit for each country in Simcountry, beyond which you shouldn't be allowed to purchase anything. It certainly forces a certain amount of responsibility upon players in Simcountry.
However, it makes no sense to prohibit purchasing of offensive weapons when a country's net cash is only below 3T, when that same country is allowed to continue purchasing other commodities until its net cash is below 14T. Offensive weapons are even more important for defense than defensive weapons are! The debt limit is a good idea, but the limit should be the same for purchasing everything.
#3: Automatic selling of resources from a country's stockpile when that country runs out of cash is, at least in its current form, a terrible idea. The criteria which the game uses to determine when a country is bankrupt and should sell resources from its stockpile, do not accurately reflect the true financial situation of that country.
You could have a country which earned 80B in gross monthly profits, with a 40B monthly budget surplus, and with 6T loaned out to other countries, but if that country makes a sudden, emergency purchase of weapons to protect itself and ends up with 2T in negative cash before any of its loan requests have gone through the system, the game assumes that the country is bankrupt and begins automatically selling stuff, even though the country is in very good financial condition. Then when you have to buy that stuff back in an emergency, it actually costs you more money than if the game never forced you to sell it in the first place.
In contrast, you could have a country which only earns 40B in monthly profits, with a 10B monthly deficit, with no money loaned out to other countries and with 10T owed to other countries, but if that country has even the slightest bit of cash on hand for any reason, the game doesn't realize how bankrupt that country is, and so doesn't automatically sell anything from that country's stockpile, even if that country has massive numbers of unneeded weapons and there is no war threat. Its just a stupid system!
If there is going to be a system which automatically sells commodities from a country’s stockpile, the automatic selling function should be tied to the total sum of a country’s immediate cash minus the amount of debt which that country owes plus the amount of money which that country is currently loaning to other countries and enterprises. This would give a much more accurate picture of a country’s true financial condition.
#4: The game should stop automatically loaning players money whenever they need it, especially at such low interest rates. Currently, the interest rates on loans are fixed so low that there’s almost no reason to ever pay one’s loans off. An economically strong country could essentially service its debt indefinitely without suffering any significant burden as a result of it. Currently, the only real reason to pay one’s debts back is to keep your country some distance away from the debt limit so that you have an extra financial cushion in case of unexpected expenses, i.e. war.
I think it would be much better if loans could only be given by other players, if those players were allowed to loan money at whatever interest rates they saw fit, and if debtor nations were given the option of defaulting on their loans. The risk of a state defaulting on its debt would force creditors to be very cautious about who they loaned to, and would encourage them to charge much higher interest rates on loans to states which were less likely to repay their debts. This would provide a much stronger incentive for players to repay their loans.
In fact, it might even make the aforementioned mandatory debt limit unnecessary, because creditors would be afraid to loan money to any player who already owed too much money to other players, for fear that they would not be able to pay that money back. Thus, borrowing limits would be imposed naturally by market forces, and would not need to be imposed arbitrarily by the game.
#5: Eliminate SC$ as the universal currency of the game, and allow countries to issue their own currencies and to collect taxes from corporations in their own currencies or whatever other currencies they wish. Then, allow all countries’ currencies to be traded with exchange rates determined by free-market competition. Then, instead of allowing governments to borrow money directly, allow governments to issue bonds which can be bid upon either by other players using the currency of the nation which issues the bonds, or else by the central banks of those nations using electronically created currency.
The existence of multiple competing currencies would further serve to discourage excessive borrowing on the part of Simcountry players, because if a player continued to borrow perpetually more and more currency for their nation and to spend it on things, that currency would continuously lose more and more of its value to price inflation, until eventually there would be no more demand for that currency. Instead, players would be compelled to maintain a very tight, responsible national budget, to avoid running deficits, and to pay back their debts, all in order to avoid destroying the value of their nations’ currencies via inflation, and to thus ensure that there would be a continuous demand for their nations’ currencies on the international market.
Note: I’m saving a backup copy of this post. If you delete it, I’ll just re-post it somewhere else.
