W3C - Simcountry Update December 28

Notifications Extended

Read about these new features in a separated discussions explaining all details.

Corporations

Many corporations will become more profitable.
Some changes to the corporate model will make these corporations more profitable, mainly by reducing their costs.

This change will increase the income of countries and will also increase the market value of corporations.

We are also looking at severe shortages of materials in all the worlds.
We think that some shortages will be reduced,
The price range of products (the difference between the lowest price possible and max price setting for each product) should be extended.

We think that if products show very long term shortages, their price should increase more, making the corporations very profitable and attracting more players to create such corporations.

On the other hand, is there are surpluses, prices should go down further to the point of bankrupting the corporation.
The country will then be able to replace these corporations with ones that can be more profitable.

players can of course preempt this by closing losing corporations or changing them to produce a different product.

Excellent news!!!

he's saying the basement/ceiling price for produced goods will be extended beyond what it is.

last i checked market value ranged +/-50% of the base price, what I'm reading is that will be extended to what? 60%? 75%? but enough to force loser corps to close do to failure. this result in those things that are always green going red, and the elimination of absurd shortages

for things like construction and service, prices will increase even further, making those corps more profitable. things that are traditionally bad, will take a hit until many of those corps fail, the production goes down and the price recovers

this is most likely a positive change. as it will smooth out the economic system, and require less GM intervention of collapse.

if you think about it, this actually offers allot of economic opportunities beyond corp management. if price range is extended beyond the current

buying something at 50% base, then selling it at 150% is triple profit. if that is changed to +/- 75% your talking potential profit of 7 times.

so in anticipation, you could buy a bunch of luxury goods, or silver, or what ever. wait for the those corps to close, then when the price recovers, sell for a profit.

not to mention, a concentrated group effort of flood a market to run competition out of business, in say EP, will possibly be more effective,
*****
although, I am a tad doubtful. most players already don't build things like luxury goods, or silver, because they are losers. players tend to only mostly tech type corps, because they are high profit, and employ allot of high paying techies, (taxes) so i'm uncertain this will really have the desired effect.

it will increase corp profit, but also increase country running cost. and its unlikely to actually decrease huge shortages.

I think I have to agree with Sheepman that this (re corporations) is an unnecessary fix at this point in time to the game. I am hoping it does not lead to unwanted micromanaging of one's countries and corporations. Currently all my countries have well rounded economies in that they have corporations that produce food, agriculture, services, construction, industry, mining with a bit of military and recreation. Now with what is being proposed I would have to cancel several of my corporations to then make bricks! What are the people of these worlds going to eat if everyone makes bricks!
I know with some of the most recent game tweaks several members of a federation I belong to on KB their economies were collapsing. So much so that one member who is part of the Security Council had to leave that organization to request financial aid (when your a member of the Security Council you cannot request or receive aid for yourself).
And what happens to the C3 corporations and economies? What happens when they start going bankrupt? World depression on the scale no one has seen (well I saw it once before more than a year ago when White Giant world economy completely tanked with no real explanation).

i think you guys are over thinking this. nothing is really going to change, winning corps will still be winners, and losers, losers. its just that this will be a little exaggerated.

the main reason i even checked the forums, was to find out why my unemployed techies jumped so high. i didn't even really notice a problem with country profit. but i don't build an income tax based econ, i base my econ on corp profit. so a sudden jumped in unemployed professionals had no effect on my bottom line.

but thats my experience with this update

i run corp salaries at 100, gov at 120, and run minimal country indexes, it ends up reducing the cost, more than than it does turn over.

I think it is wrong to sit on the same corporations forever, you need to search and be rewarded of your findings, that is interesting part of the game and I hope this piece will be further improved. It should be easier so go from one type of corporations to others and there are many solutions how to improve that too e.g. today you need to pay GCs to change type of the corporation but it would be a very different situation if you could do that by paying part of corporation value as a change fee.

To my knowledge the economic part of the game was not broken -it was the war game that needed fixing.
My experience with changes in this game -generally means a fix will lead to something else breaking and more frustration.

Well, it is really funny to be named "a new player", when I am one from few players still playing here who knows and remembers how it all started, restrictions, limitations, profit cuts and etc. I can really compare things at much larger scale. I can still remember times when Direct trading has been implemented, or when the first nuclear weapons were used.

https://www.simcountry.com/discus/messages/1/14743.html?

The game is very complex so any little thing can cause a harm if not all moving parts are taken into consideration. That's true, but that doesn't mean you need to stop making changes looking for best game balance.

I returned to this game not because of the things I don't like but because there are so many things I like, nothing is perfect, I suppose.

I do see that C3 countries are not reacting to market shortages as they once did, which means shortages remain for a very long time and market is not moving as it should.

War protection is overdone, but on the other hands there is no easy recovery for people after defeat, so the question again is about what is the right balance. I once destroyed 2 most powerful federations in FB with more than 50 good countries and the only feeling after that was... sorry... because these good people left the game after years playing together and for me to sit on top1 place without any opponents was not funny at all.

3 simple things are needed, precisely at the below sequence:
1. Recovery system to help players restore their empires after lost wars, they already have experience to play. Once pop of default C3 was 5 M, today start is much easier.
2. Higher profits to allow buying and supporting of decent armies.
3. Remove limitations from war and economy and population growth.
4. Success.

as a suggestion, perhaps some one needs to point out this is a country building game, not a game-building game.

a more buggy, less robust version of the same war engine, has successfully nurtured competition, and seen many players and factions vying for dominance.

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Like C3's having nuclear defense missiles, yet you cant even nuke them. This is were sense comes in???? -Sheep,<!-/Quote-!>

They added secured mode for you main country, to prevent aggressive vets from running off all the new players. to get around this, vets would nuke neighboring C3s to cause nuclear fall out, the GM turned of fallout for secured countries, then several years and player-gm moves later, you don't know why it is that way.

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there is already (honestly) factors that i dont even know what people are talking about, like corperations debt bombing, just reads like the stupidest stuff iv ever read, like why are you going to target corporations for debt? -Sheep<!-/Quote-!>

debt bombing was a tactic. when a player would hostile bid on one of your corporation, because thier is no way to counter bid, you could instead, manually take loans in the corp, then transfer the cash out, the corp would pretty much die after the other player paid you, then he'd take the debt.

this came to an end, my 4 person fed was trying to pick a fight with another fed. myself and another player took over a couple of their leaders countries, but he got allies to help him, he bid on all the CEO corps in his country, which those CEOs debt bombed. the first country caught me by surprise, cost me over 100T in cash. The second country, i was ready for, just before I finished it off, I waited, and allowed the debt bomb process to complete before I owned the country, which would transfer the debt to the original owner. i still took the country with enough time deal with the last few, see if I could figure out a better work around.

but the thing is, once the bids are in, their was no way to cancel them, so by using a seam in the game, my opponent was able to make a profit off of losing his country in battle. so the GM ended debt bombing.

ironically, this fed war that I provoked, was the final straw that led to war levels. this entire fed, literally, fired every weapon they had at one of my countries, and only dented the defense.

in reference to my last post

this entire thread is an example of my disappointment with the current game enviroment.

players use to figure things out, find ways of doing things. rather than complain that the game didn't work right.

yes, we complained, but part of the fun was figuring out how to do things, now-a-days, it seems every one runs their countries via a template, and get upset if that doesn't work.

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On the other hand, is there are surpluses, prices should go down further to the point of bankrupting the corporation.
The country will then be able to replace these corporations with ones that can be more profitable. -W3C<!-/Quote-!>

pretty sure i gave a good guess earlier.

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market value ranged +/-50% of the base price, what I'm reading is that will be extended to what? 60%? 75%? -Josias<!-/Quote-!>

this means that loser corps, will be bigger losers, and winners will be bigger winners. this isn't really complicated, and is just an exaggeration of what we already have.

your over thinking this.

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Actually correction; you cant run a country outside of that template, iv tried and fact is you dont build buy certain guidelines pretty much just hurting yourself. -Sheep<!-/Quote-!>

The Commonwealth of Benninio -WG

Given its a small country, but I've run this same non-standard country template with much larger countries.

to further support my point, about the rigid lack of econ flexibility, even among top notch players, go read a thread on the LU forum, "pissing contest,"

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is how i look at base country profits, the rest is history for the most part, though note workers that are high level such as HTE or HTS and high salaries contributes to unruly government and health/edu increases that are very gross. To note low salaries are likely a much better option, also with more stupid workers. -Sheep<!-/Quote-!>

can you please rewrite that?

But I'll take a crack at it.

as far as enterprise participation, yes, i have zero CEO corps.

I run 75% corp tax, this is an semi-intentional hostile CEO environment.

Their are several reasons.

1. CEOs aren't always good at running corps

2. CEOs aren't as intimate with my work force as I am. I'm very good at manipulating my work force to not need intervention. I.E. I never have to demote workers to HLW. This has a long term effect that is difficult to measure.

But this worker effect. I had to look around for a few minutes to find a country near my size.

The Kingdom Of Garcilazo WG

Sorry Garcilazo, you where randomly picked.

him 39.9M
me 37.6M

close enough for a comparison.

compare my 60-65 age HLW to his.
him 218,346
me 76,549

this means his HLW are retiring, and need to be replaced at a rate of 3 to 1.

But for the total number of pop in the 60-65 age category
him 1,674,168
me 1,481,188

this is an imperfect comparison, as he seems to be badly over built, with a huge EI

but it seems to me, that the built in auto-adjust of workers demotes older workers to HLW, that have a short career, before they need to be replaced, making the problem worse.

I realize this is slightly off subject, I'm just trying to point out that Simcountry is a very sophisticated game, that players seem to be missing.

It reminds me of the saying, "I can't see the forest through all these trees!!!"

yes, i rule my country like a total despot

Sheepman, you can look at every single change from a negative side and this is your choice of course. Every player has a bit different his own version of simcountry which is the best versions of all. Having so many different expectations will always cause anger or resistance to any changes, but GMs also are making decisions based on what they think is needed for a game, as they have very limited resources, they have to prioritize a lot and some bugs may not be worth time fixing because that time could be spend to some feature that will have the better outcome. All this is a bit wild kind of development, but SC players have always been finding the best ways to live in such situations and use that for their favor.

I do like players who are angry, because I believe they care of the game most. Those who don't care just ignore. The other truth is that players cannot see the numbers of profit and other KPIs this project achieves, and it is very hard to run such project for such a long time and not to close which means decisions made by W3C are needed ones.

Funny.
Lots of complaining about something that was not broken in the first place.
It is easy to sit behind your screen and shout for ever.
True, this change may not do anything for you personally so why not shout about it.
We also like people to give us the bad news. It makes us work harder and resolve problems.
But in the heat of the shouting there is some real nonsense that came on line here. We will remove it on Tuesday.

We had recently some mail discussions with several players and increased profitability is among the main issues that were easy to improve.

We have increased the profitability of many corporations.
They also pay more taxes and countries are becoming more profitable.
The market value is increasing and went already a long way.

Most of you may not need it but many others do and will be able to do more.

Shortages were very large. This too is no problem for most people here but is a problem for players who do not know how to get their corporations to produce.

We have slightly reduced the amounts of products used and shortages came down a bit.

You can of course speculate about surpluses that will destroy your corporations. Nice for a great discussion, only it will not happen. Changes are small. The need for products might have spiked down for a very short time but the markets will balance at maybe 20% less shortages than before.

The price range is not changed yet. We ant to see where the markets settle.

What was done to make the corporations more profitable?

To offer more discussion on the subject. To illuminate the possibilities of this upcoming change, and to put in another request for a game feature the GM have always said no to.

Books and Newspaper(BN), has always been a heavy red market.

The main supply of BN is, paper

Paper 325,000tons -298,515,271 (shortage on WG)
# of Corporations producing this product: 608

And for paper, the main supply is Wood

Wood 475,000tons -2,166,128,945
# of Corporations producing this product: 892

So, a group of players, say 5, could each build 20-30 wood corps, and 15-20 paper. These corps could be placed in C3s, run with minimal salaries, and minimal supply quality. But the point would be to over produce supplies, lowering the market price. When the market price lowers, the players manually buy the surplus, at what ever quality.

---> Extra trick, you can keep different qualities of the same product by keeping them in separate space centers, just don't mix them when you move them in and out. you know, have an extra station to get something out of your way.

You would probably wanna buy one quality for manually supplying your corps, and another with the intent to resell directly into the world market. Keeping them in different space centers.

Last I checked, you can manually sell at double the market value, that is 200Q. Unless my memory is incorrect, this means that (premium members,) if you intend to buy/sell supplies for profit, you buy at 200Q, then manually sell at 200% the market value to adjust for the product quality.

And back from that little side track.

Corps outside this operation should close. Causing severe shortages. As new Wood and paper corps are being built to compensate, the Paper Cartel has enough wood and paper to keep their BN and paper corps running.

While the price is rising, the Paper Cartel, will uncheck the auto-sales box in the animated options. Under Existing Corps, their is a product sales check box, you can turn off auto-sales. This feature does work, last i checked, but it wasn't straight forward, I think you have to toggle each corp individually, rather than using the master button.

In the twilight time of price changes, the Paper Cartel will have to inject money into these corps. But once the price returns, they turn on autosales, and instantly flood the market.

Rinse, repeat.

I've played around with this in that past. But *normal* GM intervention would prevent this from being effective. This upcoming change will make this group based econ strategy more viable.

And of course wood-paper-BN is only one of hundreds of possibilities.
*****
Now the rejected game feature.

I think CEO's should have "project pages,"

The CEO should be able to view all his corps together. But Each CEO should have the ability to have several projects, that require different settings for the corporation. I.E. "Project pages," So the CEO can assign Corps to a specific project, it would show up in that project, and would allow the CEO to change the settings of the all corps in that project, with out effecting other corps.

Its not really necessarily, it'd just make some things easier.

Balla Bing....Happy new year Josias
Paper cartel lol Thats some hard core NWO s#it going on there lol

The idea of manipulating the market is OK.
A group of players could do this but it but you need to stay on top of it and keep maintaining it.
This never happened.
The market can be manipulated but it is not trivial.

Gamemaster interventions.

The subject comes up now and then and we explain now and then.

Any possible interventions never change the market situation in terms of shortages or price levels.
The mechanism makes sure the market does not fall over.

Example: services are used in nearly all products. A huge shortage will collapse the entire market. When the shortage numbers become far too high, the process adds 10% of the shortage quantity.
The shortage remains, and the price also remains at the top of the range.

Most products never get to this level of shortages and there are never any interventions.

If more players would react to severe shortages and start new corporations, such situations will never occur.

Extending the price range of products make sense if players react to the increased profits and start new corporations. This will also prevent any interventions from ever occurring.

The latest update last week, reduced the use of products by corporations by several percentage points. It has reduced shortages a bit and there are very few interventions.

Some remained:
Check strategic bases and airports on FB.
A Huge shortage and too few corporations.
Some bases are added from time to time or otherwise, all the corporations producing military base maintenance products will be closed. There will be no such products any more which will require other interventions and all the military base producing corporations will die too.
All this could be prevented by some players building strategic base and airports producing corporations on FB and making great profits.

Andy, thank you.

I wasn't making an accusation about GM intervention. I'm aware that it is necessary.

And your right, it would take a constant effort. Perhaps more than a team would want.

But I'd also suggest that this kind of aggressive econ, is something that players have always been disappointed hasn't existed.

Although, I'm sure that every one has their own idea what "aggressive econ," means. I think we'd all probably agree that building corps to fill world shortages, is rather tame.

Happy New Year Nix, thanks

It is tame but profitable.
I did not see any accusation and even if so, we can handle it.

I said many times: we like criticism because it triggers improvements.
Just imagine everyone here will start giving us good news.
I will be out of here.
On the other hand, turning any change, even if obviously helpful, into an ugly discussion is mean and hateful.

We were engaged very recently in an exchange, (on going as we speak), about many things that can be improved.
We like it a lot because the arguments are good, we do not agree with all, and the way they are brought is constructive.
This person loves the game and wants to make it better.
The current improved profitability is a first easy result. We were for it even before but it triggered the immediate response.

we are pro more aggressive approach to the markets and it is not true that it does not happen.
We are some times accused of "interventions" when shortages are turned into large surpluses. We never do so. I explained before, we never change the market direction.
Some players do.
Some products are easier to do it with.

we are not hands on. We automated all our procedures. We do not know where these actions come from and we do not want to know.
Seeing the numbers after a complaint, it is clear that a player or a group did it.