W3C - Game News 11.2.2014

1. Cost Reductions

The cost of all products, and mainly the cost of weapons and ammunitions was reduced further today. Production numbers increased and profitability remains at a high level.
These cost reductions are a further step in the long term process that is aimed at reducing the number inflation in Simcountry and bringing it to more realistic numbers.

The increased production of some corporations may help to stabilize the market that suffers large shortages. The changes are too small to make a big difference. Short term, even small changes can affect the market that will then take several days to stabilize at a slightly different balance.

2. Efficiency Upgrades

Corporations can upgrade their efficiency but there is some confusion about these upgrades and their advantages.

Every efficiency upgrade reduces the work force of the corporation. The number of low and medium workers can be reduced by several hundred but on the other side, the number of managers and high tech workers and executive increases slightly.
In general, the efficiency upgrades reduce the work force but increase the average education level required for workers.

The total number of the work force decreases. The cost decreases slightly and decreases more if the salary level in the corporations is high. More workers become available to work in other corporations. The country can maintain more corporations with the same number of the population and the profitability of the corporations increases.

Increasing the efficiency of many corporations requires a good level of education that can deliver the larger numbers of higher educated works. If education fails, there will be shortages of professionals and corporations will not be able to hire the workers they need. The advantage of efficiency will turn into a disadvantage with reduced hiring and reduced production.

We have now started a process that will increase the advantages of the efficiency upgrades. The reduction in the number of workers will become more steep and the cost to the corporation too. Using efficiency upgrades in combinations with a good education system will result in more productivity and profitability.

A first step in this direction is part of the current upgrade.

I like the second part quite much, more efficient efficiency upgrades

For the first Part: The Problem with decreasing inflation is that it gives an advantage for the players that allready own more SC$ to the ones that dont as inflation decreases worth of money earned long time ago and therefore also would make it easier for new players to pay of debts and closing the gap to older player's riches.

Wouldn't it be better, in this regard, to let inflation go as it wants and maybe just divide all SC$ numbers once a year by 2 or something? Even though it might be a more radical attempt this way we could have 'realistic' numbers and still have a healthy inflation.

Oh and as you may have not seen my reply to last update I'll just post here:

About 6. Search for Countries

Would it be much more complex to let the algorythm work all countries instead of a random 300? It's a bit frustrating hitting the search button again and again while it could be possible, even if it's quite small Chance, that it just looks into the same countries over and over again. I'd think it would also be less Server load to once work a request through all countries instead of having a big number of requests on a small part of it. To reduce the needed load you could even tell it to stop as soon as it would find 10 Fitting results so it doesnt really has to work all countries while making the CEOs life way more happy

I also really like the change to efficiency upgrades - maybe it will actually be possible to meet the elusive "Min. Target" number of corporations displayed on the "Important Things To Do" page.

I like Borg Queen's suggestion about improving the search function that CEO's use to build/relocate corps. If bandwidth is the reason to limit the results to 300, I'd suggest another possibility:

(1) CEO goes to a page that lists countries, sorted with lowest tax at the top, and including columns for Welfare, % Unemployed, with or w/o president, and # of corps CEO already owns there, if any.

(2) CEO chooses either "Relocate Corporation Here" or "Build New Corporation Here." In either case, the CEO still ends up at the page that shows expected hiring and has a chance to confirm.

I feel like this would be more efficient with respect to CEO's time (hitting the "search again" button) and bandwidth (no searching - more like the lists of countries/enterprises ranked by score).

It might have the added bonus of encouraging more countries to lower their taxes. Given how the number of active presidents is low relative to the corporation building capacity of CEOs, there isn't a whole lot of incentive to lower taxes much below 25% - and to keep them low after raising employment above 90% - because CEOs have no better options (this is also partly because you can't have more than 6 corps in a particular country). There's probably more (and better) ways to better balance the tax leverage between presidents and CEOs (I always liked the idea of a bidding system where the CEO proposes a corp and minimum tax/welfare parameters, then countries bid against each other for that corp), but I thought I'd throw that out there.

Dividing all numbers by 2 would be a huge task.
Numbers go everywhere in the game and you can't just do it.

The efficiency numbers will be improved more and will be shown in a new document we are preparing.

The seach is not hugly important.
The practice is that you do fund a country fairly quickly.

searching 6000 countries takes far too long.