W3C - Planned update to to Simcountry (not war related)

The following is a result of recent discussions on the forum about possible changes to the game.
We intend to implement these changes.

1. We will replace the Simcountry chat by a link to the Simcountry server on Discord. The forum remains unchanged. Players will be able to join the forum immediately after registration without any delay.

2. Limit the storage of weapons on enterprises. We will explain/announce before actions are taken.

3. No change in the number of corporations moving out of the countrty. Will add more messages and warnings before it happens.

4. There are many players with a lot of money, they need new ways to use the money.
We intend to add new features.

5. Game maps will be improved. Mainly the graphics of the larger maps can be enhanced. Other improvements too.

6. We are looking at a feature that will make it possible to relocate your country to a different place in the same world. The function frequency of use will not be limited. The country should not be involved in war and relocation will carry a price in Gold coins.

7. Upgrade the initial screens when players and visitors are entering Simcountry. Visitors should see the 5 worlds and some of their parameters and be able to zoom into these worlds and end up with a choice of a country.

8. We will increase the spending space for countries with larger population.

9. We are currently streamlining many pages and are improving navigation.

10. Selling countries should be improved. The conditions are too tight and by the time the sale should finalize, some conditions are frequently out of the required range.

11. The number of Federation members will be revised. We will look into the number of players instead of only the number of countries.

12. Several data fields are missing on the Enterprise financial page. These must be added.

This sounds fantastic, both the fact that you guys started sharing your development backlog and also the above changes prioritized - this is highly appreciated.

just few comments/advices from me:

1. This is just great
2. Let's discuss the concept before you commit to develop it - in general please review what is "Active" and what is "Inactive" weapon and cost related to this as consequence of this change will mean reviewing how weapons should be stored in countries instead.
3. no comments
4. Yes, please add more ways - maybe buying professionals using cash could be an idea.
5. Cool, looking forward to seeing this.
6. I am glad you like this as well
7. Sounds great
8. Super, you may also need to reduce military spending for new players
9. We see and like that, please continue
10. cool
11. Finally! super happy reading this
12. yes, please add this missing information to bring transparency about CEO financials.

New Issue added:

13. Increase the corporate construction queue from 10 to 18 corporations.

I like the list so far except for weapon storage in enterprises.

I would like more discussion on that item.

We have a problem with storage of weapons in enterprises.
The weapons are moved away from the countries to cut cost and are not maintained.

The problem can be resolved by a general decline in quality for all products depending on their type.

20 year old vegetables and agricultural products?
weapons and ammo sitting there for 100 years.

we need a deterioration function that will reduce quality, slowly, depending on product types.
We will not try to be realistic. In reality, everything is gone quickly and max 20 years. Most products deteriorate much quicker, and we will take longer.

we also have a problem with huge enterprises.
we will not force them to reduce their sizes but we need to set a limit.

Andy,

you don't need to be too realistic, just make what makes sense gamewise.

in old days there were no inactive weapons cost and no weapons in ceos, countries had weapons reserves and used that when needed. that was simple and good.

if goal is to limit size of armies, then the best limitation is number of solders and officers. if players lack them they will buy population. limiting how many weapons players could store adding depreciation cost will prevent people from defending as they wont know what weapons to buy.

I really dont see the issue with weapons storage. The only people I see complaining about weapons storage are the people who dont really know how to use the feature. I dont see the the big problem surrounding it. Who is it hurting? I think there are bigger issues to the game then weapons storage.

There are bigger issues than weapons storage. we will not implement it next week.
but large scale weapon storage by very rich enterprises, not paying for maintenance is significantly increasing the advantages for these players.

Nice that there are rich players, no problem, but they do not need the additional advantage of not paying for maintenance.

The problem could be resolved if everyone would move the weapons from the enterprises into the countries. Is this a better solution?

I fail to see why this function will be a problem.

Mndz

I know we do not have to be very realistic. we are not and we cannot.

Inactive weapons were always maintained or for a very long time. the cost is and was a fraction of the maintenance cost for active weapons.

The aim was not to limit the size of the army.
The aim is to make sure that a large army costs more than a small one.
The limitation of the size of the army is implicit.
It it costs more, everyone will have to limit the size.

Limiting the number of soldiers, is very complex and errors will pop up when you purchase weapons, hard to explain, what about the professional soldiers and officers.

Some players use the storage as a strategic reserve. They can replace destroyed weapons while not having to recruit very large numbers into the army.

This is the good part of this feature.
the bad one, as I said before, is that it creates a financial advantage that should not be there.

In a situation with a loss of quality, there will be a real tradeoff.
strategic advantage with some cost vs. no storage in enterprises.

Loss of quality will actually make this game feature ineffective, or a hassle for players to work around the intended update. If the intention is to reduce weapons stored, I can understand this update, because the weapons will become worthless, and even worse, a burden due the averaging mechanics when weapons are added to it.

But having read that your intention is to increase costs, then please just do that. Military assets are accounted separate on the financials page of enterprises, so just increase the already present enterprise tax for military assets or add additional maintenance tax/cost to it. Or reduce costs of inactive weapons stored in countries.

Please also note that enterprise size does not say something about empire sizes.

2. I'd like to see storage of weapons in enterprises stopped completely. Enterprises were never meant to be a part of the war game and not all players have an enterprise. Having an enterprise should not give a player a strategic military advantage only an economic one.

Hurts the ability to wage war further. Makes war more expensive and time consuming than it already is. Ordering on a consistent basis is difficult enough. Huge CEOs are already a massive drain and limiting their size will also seriously alter some people’s entire eco strategy.

Very against those changes. Really hope they don’t come to fruition.

Unfair advantage? How is it unfair when your spending 30 GC a month to have this Ceo we are paying to maintain that Ceo. We are paying Maintenance costs some of us with real money. Id say its highly likely that of that feature was removed there be a lot less players paying for CEOs

No one said it was unfair, Joel. My opinion is that the CEO game is primarily intended for the economic part of the game and players have found a way to use this as a strategic military asset. I personally would like to see this loophole closed to prevent you from stockpiling lots of weapons at no cost. ;)

Andy forcing people to store weapons in their countries would bankrupt empires. Weapons that are deactivated still cost tons of money. Moving 30000 MRMB in one country even deactivated would cost like 50B - 100B. So imagine players with 500K MRMB what would be done with these because storing them in the country is bankruptcy. Punishing players who have prepared for the possibility of war is unfathomable. Whos actually complaining about this besides players who arent prepared for the possibility of war? However if this is really an issue then you can explore the possibility of significantly lowering maintenance cost for deactivated weapons.

It is not some magic loophole. It allows you to have large quantities of weapons and therefore large wars. You discourage this, you are discouraging an already dead war game. Wars are so far and few in between most players are just going to shrug and not bother with the increased cost as only a handful even participate now.

It makes it harder to buy weapons as the market already is dried up.
It makes it harder to get ready for war.
It makes it harder on established empires that already spent hundreds of trillions.
It makes war less likely to happen, especially between peers.

Take a long break? Sorry, your military has to be built from the ground up because 200 quality is useless. Oh and since you cannot pick and choose what quality of equipment to sell, you have to sell it all now if you want a military that can trade well.

If you think the stockpiles get too big, why not slap on a tax, or have it cost more to store in CEO? Why not have the price grow as your stockpile does? Or even a hard limit? I am more than a little biased as my Empire is very large and requires very large stockpiles of weapons AND my economy is profitable because I IPO all of my corporations into my very large and ever expanding CEO.

These changes would for me and others be a very fundamental change and probably require us to completely change gameplay styles. For those of us with 50+ countries across several worlds it would not be a very fun update.

Functionally, this just drives up the cost of war to no real benefit and hurts well established empires.

To run an experiment, I have:

120,000 Interceptors
115,000 Helicopters
10,000 Jeeps
30,000 MMRB
22,000 OAA

In inactive weapons in a country on FB.

The active running cost of these were -347b a month. Let us see what the inactive cost is.

Andy,

I see your point and agree to some degree on a principle that larger power needs to cost more.

this is how I would like to see this implemented:

-reduce maintenance of inactive weapons from 25% to 10%
-increase weapon reactivation/deactivation % from 10% to 30%
-forbid weapons in Ceo

weapon reactivation is too slow in order to replace destroyed weapons. With small armies it is a must to use as much of reserve as possible.

I endorse Mndz recommendations.

But I want to add.
- Combine this measure with the intended implementation of better usecases for gamecash.
- Please provide sufficient liquidity for weapons when the selloff starts.

I believe the degredation measure is horrible and will lead to all kinds of loopholes like selling/storing at low qualities (Q120) and sell to open market, creating surplus, buy back at Q330 at the desired country, right before you plan to war.. This will again favor larger players at the cost of smaller players.

I Agree with Joel... Forcing people to Store weapons in their empire especially for small and developing countries would certainly bankrupt these countries... There are more important issues than seeing storage of weapons in enterprises stopped...

Great and thank you for your contributions.

You convinced me that the quality reductions could be devastating.
We will not implement them.
But
You also convinced me that we need to do something about it.

The quantities quoted here are huge.
30000 MMRBs? 500000 MMRBs?

I think quantities should decline
cost of storage in enterprises should be introduced.

It will be slow, accompanied by a change for larger military units, maybe some reduction in maintenance cost (it was already reduced a lot in the past months).
We will discuss here the activation/deactivation pace and the cost for maintenance of deactivated weapons.

Don't hold your breath, we will take small steps, and add them to the development plan ahead of time.

About enterprises
The cost is 30 gold coins per month.
some of these enterprises are making thousands of billions in profit in each game month. the money makes it possible to support their countries if needed and pay for any wars.

I think it is a very good deal.
we made it possible to own more enterprises but they should not dominate everything.

Currently, someone could have 10 enterprises with 20.000 corporations. 5% of the entire game, not including their countries.

doing so with countries is impossible.
you will be clicking 24x7 and bankrupt because of the increasing cost in large empires.
There is no theoretical limit but a practical one.
same should apply to enterprises and their storage.

There are complaints about clicking and requests for automation.
this could make the war much faster and you will be able to destroy a country with 5 clicks. Is that what we want?
or
manage an empire much faster, resulting in 300 countries in an empire.

we have made it possible to have and keep a very large population.
a smaller number of countries with a very large population will be better than huge empires.

"The cost is 30 gold coins per month.
some of these enterprises are making thousands of billions in profit in each game month. the money makes it possible to support their countries if needed and pay for any wars."

In profit and loss terms they can make that much, but in cash flow they are typically losers currently. The enterprise tax, which does not show up on the P&L statement, only on the cash flow statement eats all and often more than the profits received.

I do not know of any player who can take cash out of enterprises on anything of a regular basis, almost all have to keep adding cash. This is not saying there are not other benefits to them to support countries, the weapons currently, the benefits of having CEO corps in a country vs country owned for the country, etc...

Currently in Hodg Industries 2 which has 792 corps:

Enterprise tax -135.36B
Cash transfer -5B
Profit Payment 80.44B
Income from Dividend 56.30B

Result -3.62B cash flow

The P&L Statement shows 511.24B profit for corps,yet cash flows negative 3.62B

Currently in Union Inc owned by Joel

Enterprise Tax -52.24B
Cash Transfer -110B
Profit Payment 34.28B
Income from Dividend 0.31B

result -127.65B

The P&L Statement shows 163.09B in profit for corps, yet cash flow is negative 127.65B

Currently in Golden Goose owned by King Aaren I, just made top CEO last month

Enterprise Tax -229.93B
Cash Transfer -50B
Profit Payment 295.35B
Income from Dividend 3.13B

result 18.55B

Yet the P &L shows 687B in profit for the corps, this is with 856 corps.

Currently in trader owned by you Andy

Enterprise tax -9.41B
Cash Transfer 0
Profit Payment 9.57B
Income from Dividend .25B

result .41B

Your P & L shows 19.15B profit

Currently in WGandy owned by you

Enterprise Tax -5.14B
Cash Transfer 0B
Profit Payment 4.87B
Income from Dividend 0

Result -0.27B

Your P & L Shows 3.58B in profit

Also if you look at your trend lines on WGandy its constantly down for cash.

These are just 5 examples, if you add up cash flows for most enterprises they are typically negative. Also look at cash available charts they almost all trend down with sudden upticks when cash is added. The way enterprises display profits is pretty much useless for determining the actual enterprise performance.

Weapons upkeep is a logical requirement Andy.

I am more than willing to pay simpeople to start my military equipment a few times a year and keep the fluids changed.

Andy, you say 30k mrmbs is a high number, but have you ever calculated how much oaabs or mrmbs you need to take actually advance to war level 25 per level? Some weeks ago I started with 24k oaabs Q315ish on WL12 and my 24k oaabs got slaughtered by C3. I will retry soon, but with 40k. If you say this 40k number should go down, why you have 800 helicopter defense wings at Q690 in a WL25 C3 war if I may ask?

Enterprises:
The only very profitable enterprise I see is KarlVs Wolf Industries at FB. He is banking 5.7T gross, which is probably 4T net (70% due 30% C3 country tax), minus 1.7T enterprise tax, is 2.3T (=40% of 5.7T gross). But how did he manage this?

1. He builds 95% mining corporations, currently 2399 corporations, which are naturally limited at 100 per enterprise, but if you create a second enterprise, which he has, its called "Imperial Estates" at FB", builds them there, and after 8 days, his Wolf Industries buys them from Imperial Estates, you can circumvent this limitation. Buying corporations is limited by 6 per hour. Lots of clickings/micromanaging.

2. He gets an enterprise tax deduction, because the "Total Market Value of all Corporations" value is maxed out @ 3000T, which enterprise tax is based on.

3. He has virtually no other assets in his enterprise.

@Andy

On the quantity of weapons,

Part of the reason it is concerning is because that is what is required to take down other countries. The quantities are indeed large, but even for a country outside of Federation air defense the offensive cost is very high. In his post about our war with David, EO highlighted how much it really took to take down a country, even outside of Federation air defense. In the end EO succeeded, but only due to an ungodly amount of MMRBs and OAA's. If David had two countries with similar defenses up responding with Federation air defense, it might have been impossible. The quantities of weapons currently provided are arguably not enough and we're talking about reducing them by driving up their maintenance cost.

I understand that Federation air defense is being looked at currently, but I just caution making it even harder on attacking forces. It is very difficult now. I know of two sure-fire ways to defeat Federation air defense and they both require massive amounts of weapons.

A very popular method of taking down defenses is using the MMRB/OAA combo. Using LDI as an extreme example, exactly how many MMRBs and OAAs do you think it would take to break their Federation air defense? We're talking about millions of interceptors and helicopters. If the numbers above surprise you, test it out yourself. Make three test countries, put 50k ints/helis in with like 10mil ammo each and see what it takes to break Federation air defense, or take the country. Or really, any other weapon.

Basically,

I don't think the amount of equipment is the issue. The casualty rate offensive forces take when Federation air defense responds is not-sustainable. In the games current state the only way to try to overcome this is overwhelming numbers of offensive weapons, which some argue is still impossible. But because you can hoard weapons, for some large groups it still is.

I think the "numbers problem" is inexorably tied to the War Engine and a decrease in offensive weaponry will only serve to make this problem worse.