W3C - Product shortages

Shortages in several products have become very high.
example:

Asset Maintenance Units.

we have now extended the price range for this product and allow the price to increase more.
As a result, these corporations will become more profitable.

we will look into more products and based on the "value of the short supply" (quantity x market price), may increase their price range.

Thank you, andy! this is what we need

We need good money for the advanced corporations such as those. if not they are no better then corn corporations for cattle feed.

Andy,

There are a LOT of products that fully upgraded, selling for game maximum price and required for many of these newer factories that are still losing money.

My salaries are 400 .. that's never been excessive before.

The problem is compounded by the required products for corps such as asset maintenance.

1. producing space products is a money pit.
2. very few players have the assets to produce space products and are generally producing them for their own purpose and wouldn't sell them on the open market if they could.

Sounds like you guys have a road block there.

Look at defensive fortification corps.

They are maxed out on game price.
The corps still lose money.
The only reason I have any defense fortification corps is for my own countries. I couldn't care less if a maintenance corp needs them.

If I'm going to subsidize a product it's for my own use. And more than likely when I have all I want I'll either convert or close the corp.

Look at Mercury, I built one corp when they came out and started buying it myself.

Now I have more than enough Mercury stored to poison the entire universe and there is still no demand for it.

Yankee,

Good remarks here.

Salaries at 400 are fine, and bring in more than they cost.

I will look at the products you mentioned.
The new products created a market for shuttles and space centers. I recently saw large shortages.

I will make sure that these more difficult products will reward their producers with higher profits.

At this point, a fully upgraded corporation should be very profitable if the product they produce does not have an oversupply.
we check this very frequently.

Mercury is not yet in full use. The situation will change. Don't poison anybody in the mean time.

In general, we also check how many corporations there are in each world of each type, you can see this on the Trade->Utilization page.
We try to create a market for all types that are showing very low numbers so that these products become part of the mix and their producers can count on some ongoing sales.

If you have any specific case where a corporation, does what it should and it is not working, (losing money), give me a name of a country/enterprises and a name of the corporation. I will look into it and find the reason.

I can't name specifics because the corps were removed due to profit losses, but things like (I think) batteries, robotics, mobile devices and monitors (things like this) were not profitable even with managed salaries and supply costs...I just couldn't get them profitable (even with ridiculous shortages).

Andy,

Would you and the other GM's please look at tweaking space corporations. Some of the requirements for the corporations are massively overblown.

A shuttle corp requires 2240 components per month. That's the full production of 5 component corporations(they only produce 5940 per year). This doesn't include the dozens more needed to create the other supplies.

Considering components are used in very space product you would need a dozen or more to be able to self support even a single shuttle corporation for production. Since shuttles are needed for asset maintenance it makes the far to hard to supply these products.

I'm not sure if the massive numbers needed in shuttle production are an oversight or if the component corporations need an increased production, but I thought id bring it to the GM attention.

I know.
You are right.
Now that we need more shuttles, it becomes obvious.

I have already tuned them, the next step will be in the next update.

A player is now trying to setup a huge space industry and see how it works.
already more than 60 corporations involved, only three cargo shuttle producers.
lots of cash needed but I think it will become very profitable.

We will tune several times and make it more reasonable and easier to do. we will not trivialize ti.

Fully upgraded corporations are in general very profitable and we have recently increased the price range and allow pricing to increase more if there are long term shortages.

If the price is depressed due to overproduction, nothing will help. close them or change the output product.

upgrade efficiency. it reduces the number of workers even more than before and it is gradually expanding to more types of corporations.

Keep giving us feedback. we will look into these cases.

Thank you Andy,

I agree it should take some bit of skill to produce these products exp since they are higher level and I certainly do not want the space game to become a trivialized part of the game.

I produce shuttles and in fact make a good amount of money. However, the other products since they are stagnant in price often lose money month to month so cash injections are needed.

Small suggestion if I can?
Whats the possibility of allowing ---ONLY--- boosters and components to be traded openly on the world market, which would cause a HUGE increase in these corps and give players another avenue of money and make obtaining products easier? That would provide players the basic foundation of products to produce the other components and the products needed for shuttle production.

I don't know if this is helpful Andy, but I made a spread sheet of what I needed to be able to be self sufficient in shuttle production. All these numbers are current and as you can see there is a massive amount of corps that are needed for just creating the items needed to allow Shuttles to be produced. By my calculation in order to self supply 1 shuttle company you need: 1 Fuselage, 3 Engine, 2 Extensions, 1 Booster, 9 Components. This means that in total roughly 17 corporations are needed to just be able to supply the space products for a single shuttle corporation.


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Shuttles need the following items for 1 years production:
Boosters 60, Components 26880, Engines 36, Extensions 60, Fuselage 5

Fuselage corporations produce: 8 per year, Needs components 7020 per year

Extensions corporations produce: 36 per year, Needs components 3600 per year

Engines corporations produce: 13 per year, Needs components 2112 per year

Boosters corporations produce: 2760 per year, Needs components 2760 per year

Components: 5940 per year

It is easy to look at details like that an attempt to highlight things that don't seem to make sense. It has required many corporations to have a successful shuttle operation and at one time I had about 3 dozen corporations set to this task.

What drove me out of that business is the gold coin market for shuttles. Other players were willing to manage these corporations and sell their shuttles for less than I calculated the effort to make the same shuttles on my part was. So what happened? I closed my entire shuttle operation and bought the shuttles I needed off of the market.

My shuttle fleet currently consists of about 1500 shuttles and the current direct trade market allows any player to have a very competent fleet for a few coins. In this context, is there a problem in shuttle manufacture?

That said, there is a major problem right now, and its solution could change this equation. With the introduction of a corporation that consumes cargo shuttles as a component, the missing feature in the market is the ability to offer existing shuttles for supplies to these corps. The solution is almost certainly to enable the "exchange products with countries and enterprises" feature to transfer shuttles from account stock to country stock, allowing those shuttles to be, in turn, sold to the market or directly to needy corps. Once this feature exists, a future review of the world market situation and the going price of shuttles in direct trade should reveal if an issue remains in shuttle production.

Supersoldier, Thanks for the numbers. We know them but others may not.

As I said before, we will improve the numbers.
You should not need so many corporations to support one cargo shuttle producer.

Their profitability will improve. Their sale price is depressed by the contract only limitation.

There are more places where we intend to make world trade possible.

Aries

It did cross my mind to have the possibility to move shuttles back to the country of the owner.
I will look at the possibilities to add to the game.

The Cargo shuttle industry now makes sense and it is profitable.
we have introduced several products to create markets for products that were not consumed.
Some were not produced at all which represented a problem when someone needed them.