W3C - Game news February 26

1. Cash Log for Countries

A partial cash log is introduced on the financial pages of the country. The log shows many of the cash transactions that have taken place in the country in the past period.
The log will help you in finding out what happened to your money while you were away.

Although there is a cash flow page where you can see recent incoming and outgoing cash, the page is not very detailed while the log has all the information about single transactions.

The log however is incomplete.

The financial transactions of countries include many details and many types of payments and income and not all are now recorded.
Work will continue and more types of transactions will be added to the log. The next update will include all transactions that are related to loans and interest payments. It will become available next week.

2. War Level Awards

War level awards have been increased again. The correct numbers are showing in the war level document. The numbers are now higher, mainly for achieving war levels 4 to 7, in all worlds.

3. Lower Pricing

The move to reduce the price of products and mainly weapons and ammunition is continuing. The price of many weapons and ammo products was reduced again by 5-10%. The corporations produce larger numbers of products and the profitability of the corporations remains unchanged.

4. Profitability

The profitability of countries and enterprises is excellent. Anyone who takes good care of the base parameters of Simcountry can make a country reasonable profitable, and enterprises are even easier.
It is also possible to increase profitability much higher and make countries and enterprises into big earners.
Make sure you know the markets and see which products are in severe shortage. There are many big earners and it makes sense to create new corporations making these products or convert existing ones to produce them.

5. New Style Pages

Many more pages are now converted to the new style and more will follow.

6. Space Trading and incomplete trades

Space trade pages have been improved to show more data. Trade pricing is now clearer, showing the price as a number of gold coins for a fixed number of products.
When products are offered on a space station and then moved away, a trade sometimes cannot be executed or only partially executed. From now on, if the number of products offered is not available, the transaction will not take place and the offer will be removed.
When you offer products on a space station, please make sure you have these products on that space station for delivery when these products are bought.

7. Corporate Contracts

When the full production of a corporation is offered in a contract, the quantity used to be set to whatever "full" production was at the time the contract was created.
We have now made such contracts adapt the quantity to the full production when the contract is executed each game month. If production increases or is reduced, the contract will adapt automatically.

Existing contracts will not change. New contracts for "Full Production" will be flexible starting today.
Contracts for fixed numbers of products remain of course possible too.

8. Bug fixed: Moving a specific type of a military unit into a Depot

A rare error was reported, found and fixed. It caused the disappearing of a unit when moved into a depot. The error did not occur in all cases and luckily did not cause a lot of damage.

9. Navy on the Move

Navy units on the move now show current position. Before, a nearby country name was shown. The navy units show up on the world map instead of showing on the map of that country.

10. Changing Corporation Type

When converting a corporation, some products could show a shortage. This happened because the quantities of products used, depends on the upgrade level of the corporation. This problem is now solved. The initials supply of the products depends on the upgrade level of the corporation.

11. Use of Ammunition

More weapons now use some of their ammunition as part of their on going operations. This includes even nuclear weapons where very small numbers are used.
This is done to make sure more products in Simcountry are being used on monthly bases and corporations producing them can survive. It is also more realistic to extend the use of ammunition to all weapons.

The Contract Full production to Corporation link is missing

Go to contracts on the corporation page.
you can setup contracts with others
on that page, there is a choice to contract full production.

Andy

I don't know if this was done on purpose but you know that nuclear missile batteries corporations make 14 batteries per year?

Also side note how many nukes are used per training? Since they cost several 10's billion for good quality(and some times people need to buy them with GC) i was wondering how many are used in training for the army.

Probably corporations produce 14.4 nuclear batteries per year, increasing to 15 while the price keeps declining.
currently less than 600M no billions.

the use for training is: 0.0001 missiles.
these cost less than 8B

The cost keeps declining.

Ok just checking

Im assuming that if we see nuclear batteries corps making 14 per year we can plan to see the same thing in the other types of batteries aswell.

Also thanks for the response of the training use of nuclear weapons, because for like strategic bombs they currently cost 11.42B factoring in 300Q that means they cost 34.3B.

Just wanted to make sure they wouldn't last like 5years then be used up or something

Andy-

Relating to logic behind #11 shouldn't hospitals and schools have a sunset too? If we are looking for "reality", most schools in the US are not 50 years old let alone 300 or more.

Is there any work on an idea floated long ago about creating "small business" as a possible "industry". This could be like the back to work program taking people out of the employment pool and adding to a country's economy.

Thanks, PS. I like the updates.

Schools are maintained monthly, this is part of the cost of education.
in 300 years, they are probably rebuilt at least 10 times.

small business is a great idea but how many will be there in each country and how will they be managed.

how many workers? 100? will they contribute to the economy?
The large corporations in simcountry are structured in this way to make the economy manageable.

reality will require 500.000 businesses and I wonder how you manage them? list them? look into each one of them.

We would love to add player designed and managed corporations.

andy,
Small business would have to be managed on a small level and be similar to the house market, but with different options at the discretion of the game makers. Examples: taxes, subsidies, and how they get their goods to supply them in mass. It would be a representation and random code generation to supply a variable to your countries conditions. ie: disasters, welfare, and employment. You could list it as Entrepreneurs on the employment options and it could encompass households as a factor using some housewives and disabled automatically, since this is what some do in real life. stay at home and make money.
I see this as a great idea and as long as it adds some simple options to customize for the president to allow it to be a added income use. Of course it could be problematic with the big corps, but its trial and error to improve the game aspects.
Also, In the thought of small businesses idea, you could simply add some corps to capture other areas of the game that include franchises into one big corporation. Fast Food places can use the food market and track this also. Make a Restaurant franchise corp and cloth store corps or chain corps.
You would just add a new corp class and use the same type system as corps do. maybe add the small business class to it and generalize it some. I think that could be a way to boost our local trade scores Andy, since we must assume those are only in reality local trade. It could create a new class of workers in line up as well.
As far as how many, well that would be simple in a franchise line of corps, but in the other perceptive it would be slightly more problematic in code since the game would have to randomize it to the index and population. Just in thought it would be easier to adjust what you have vs add more code new. Adding 10-15 corps and a little rework of the way we count supply of country, which is very generalized would or could create more ways to boost migration to make more sense. It expands our way of looking at our economies. Adding a household screen tracking the same could be just a simple using what our population uses now as well. Just add some adjustments in the equations and allow for some user interactions. Of course we know its not that easy.
It would be very problematic to start with and it seems like a long term project. There are more important issues in game that require the time more than this would take to work out to be.

Just to one up this conservation, Do we start to account for visitor and tourism as well? I want a DisneyLand Corp. lol
+1 - Tmac
As far as schools go, I think that would be unimportant and could be fit into the a maintenance corp or just explained away in the normal maintenance of schools in its built in cost. I would assume some of that cost is to pay for repairs and to revamp old schools. Its something I think that could be better to over look. I can understand war supply and the new maint corps for them, but I see adding the small business aspects better and could allow the GM to make room for a maint corp or to increase cost and add a line item for school or health remodels. lol I think to come out ahead on the small business idea with some added lower cost to these areas might make more sense, as a generalization of the concept.

question about the ammo usage, is it based on the quality of the ammo in the unit/garrison, or in the inventory? that is, a unit that has upgraded ammo, will it use less ammo, than a freshly made unit?

@Josias
I think a higher quality weapon leads to decreased ammo usage.

Agreeing with josias, as i'm curious aswell

i haven't noticed a difference with how much ammo is used in training when Q is a factor, Andy should be able to clear that issue up.

The use of ammo in peacetime as part of operating the army:

The numbers of pieces of ammunition that are used depends on the quality of the ammunition stored in the country, not in the units.

The higher the quality, the lower the numbers used. and as we explained before, the advantage is greater than the increase in cost of the high quality ammo.

The change could have a large influece on the numbers used.

We said before that this change will be introduced in small steps.

As of today, the difference in use can reach 20%.
Before, it was 10%.
Next week, it will increase to 30%

purchasing higher quality ammunition increasingly makes sense.

Small businesses

Franchises are already part of the game.
when you look at a bread producing corporation, it is not one bakery. It is 10.000 bakeries, managed as one.
Same with many other consumer products, food, clothing, gasoline, etc.

Adding small businesses requires a detailed solution to several hard issues:

1. How do you set them up as there are many.
2. What do they produce
3. How do you manage thousands of little businesses
4. Imagine there are only 1.000 per country, how do we manage 5.000.000 new corporations each game month with maybe 50M transactions.
5. Who is the consumer for the products they produce and where does the money come from. you need orders coming into all these corporations and it is unclear who issues these orders.

we think that a major upgrade of the corporations game should include the possibility to produce more than one product in a corporation, like several types of cars, with different pricing and numbers and a change in the orders for cars, to become a mix of several orders that depend on the economic level of the country.
It could be expanded to "player designed" corporations that will adhere to some economic model, range of sizes, profitability etc.
It must be accompanied by a consumption model that will ensure that a percentage of spending (again depending on various parameters in the country) will be used to purchase such player designed products or otherwise these corporations will parish.