What a mess

This game is completely different now. Countries that used to run surpluses are now all bleeding. There are these constant auto transfers to state corps, not something common before. Corps are less profitable despite having high indexes.

Oh, and I only have 12 countries in my empire now. Every one except my main are being destroyed by those ridiculous rebellions. It never used to be this sever. It used to be that any above 12 would have occasional rebellions, but would only increase the more you add. This is very different now. It's clear as day.

Yeah, much to improve, but this has always been the case.

Yeah - I stepped away for a couple months. Now I'm back and can't figure what happened...new features are being added (some are awesome, some are awful) before errors in the old features are even fixed. What is the end-game here? Is there a plan to make this whole thing actually function any better? I'm really confused if its worth trying to re-build or even play at this point. Any advise?

The Game world, just like the real world, is always changing. If you use the same strategy you used in the past, you might not succeed in the future.

The forum highlights the problems, because it's our main way of giving feedback to the GMs, on what needs fixing. However, there are plenty of things that work well, and you can definitely still play the game.

Funnily enough, I kind of see adapting to the game changes, as a form of content, in of itself. Without it, Countries could be set up, and essentially run on autopilot, with the same settings, forever.

The changes, give us something to adapt to, something to reshape our setup, preventing it from becoming completely static.

whatever it is, after 8 years of this i'm about to throw in the towel. Just not as satisfying anymore. Kind of a chore.

Khome,

To be fair, 8 years is an incredibly long time, to play any game. That's an incredible amount of content and longevity.

It's also part of why I don't spam lots of countries. Having too many entities, increases the micromanagement workload. Increasing the risk of burn out.

I'd probably feel like it was a chore too, if I had a dozen countries to manage.

@Daniel. Khome once had an empire of over 80 countries on KB and always managed it (which I dare say few players on here could!) for quite a few years. His empire collapsed due to constant game changes (some good and some bad). I have now played this game for almost 7 years and fully know where Khome is coming from. This game is great but could be even better! There needs to be much more cooperation between W3C and the players. And the GM's need to listen to the players. After all we play the game. If something cannot be done then explain it to us -maybe a new feature is too technical to implement. The fact is over the years wit hall the changes the game has become more of a chore! It was never like that in the past. You never had to micromanage as much as now.

Michael;
Thank you sir!

Amen.

Maybe tell us which changes you came across.

We did not change much in empires.
we did make it easier to have an empire as a free player, start more enterprises and the cost of large empires is slightly reduced.

We have always warned players against empires larger than 20-25.

this is already far too large.

80 in unsustainable. After some months it falls apart as you can't update them all and such empires a losing money so the cost becomes unreasonable.

we had once someone with hundreds of countries.
We wrote him many times and warned that it is too large.

at the end most of these countries failed completely, were sitting there with no corporations, absolutely bankrupt.

Andy,

we have a problem with the corporations closure and building function in C3 countries. In smaller markets procedure causes to close or build too many corporations within very small amount of time. Just look at the below example, corporations are not being closed smoothly but instead in one big go which kills the market entirely, market price cannot recover when it is low, and it never drops if it is high.

Andy,

something is wrong with the market after recent updates of corporations sizes. You promised that it will not have an impact on profitability, but just look what is the reality. My CEO has over 5k corporations so I think it well represents the market situation.

Market itself became very unstable, this is in all the worlds..

Issue one:

The corporations start closing only after a major drop in the market price.
they start making losses and are closure candidates.

The closing procedure has a queue.
It will not close a very large number of corporations in a single month to prevent what you see here.

In some cases however, the number of corporations existing in the world is relatively small and the closing of even 100 can make a very big difference.

But I do not see a problem here. 70 closed in a single month and in total 120. I don't know were it went from there but assume that the market stabilized and closings eased and then ended.

When creating corporations, the priority is for the ones in worst market shortages and not many of one type in a single month.

The following month, shortages are computed again and the same, or a different type companies will be created. Many types of corporations are built each month.

Issue two:

The markets have more surpluses than before. I leave the reasons for players to discuss.
This is in general a reason for some types, or many types, of corporations to face lower product prices and profits can drop.

The increased size of corporations, has several results, depending on how it is done.

The way it was done recently:

Attempts to stabilize of the number of corporations game wide or even cause a long term decline.

Reduce oversupplies as some corporations produce smaller product volumes. (in the range of 1 to 3%).

Keeps the same profitability or increase a bit to compensate for the increase in the price of natural resources. (aiming at 1-5% higher but it is difficult to tune. In any case, profitability never declines).

This is our idea for doing this but changes must remain small.
we do not reduce your prospects for profitability
we never change shortages to oversupply or the other way around.

We are checking and rechecking the markets after each minute change and we have difficulties to see changes, not even the ones we aim for.
changes remain marginal.

All this is true in unchanging market situation.

Price fluctuations cause changes that dwarf our tuning efforts.

Andy, it is good to hear that you are tuning and looking for a better balance, balance is everything in this game. If you could involve players into thinking of best solutions i am sure we can come up with decend ideas to help you achieve what you want. Mixing your objectives with player perspective is needed not to cause a big mess to the game expierence.

Current market is very limited because thousands of mining corporations were closed and they stopped buying their supplies.that forced players to produce less variaty of products and less products are profitable in general because of less demand or high price of the mining products where they used for supplies.

Mb you can increase usage of food products in countries to compensate reduction of mining corporations, as these markets are so tiny, and these corporations use more empoyees than industry or high tech.

forget it

.

well
The issue was, did we reduced the profits of enterprises by increasing the size of corporations and the answer is NO.
I explained how it works.

Another issue was the closure of corporations in C3 countries, that is also clearer now.
I hope.

As to tuning and balancing the markets:

the way around it is by checking the acts of our imergency procedure that kick in to prevent markets from collapsing.

there are interventions, and warnings.
The procedure only does the interventions and these are few.

The warnings however, show us trends that might develop into the need to intervene.
we read these and can tune the markets.

for a very long period, years, all this was negligent.

The natural resources issue, is requiring some tuning, there are more warnings now, followed by tuning.

it will go away.

Time will show..

The way I see it, companies no longer make money. The market has collapsed across the board causing prices to fall to the point that nothing makes money. Certainly not on the scale needed for larger countries to remain profitable.

One piece that has been overlooked in the discussions I have read...the population decrease. I had 7-8 countries all with 140million plus. When you go and kill off 40 million a country to rebalance the game guess what happens....demand falls through the floor, companies no longer make money, countries no longer have enough tax revenue and you cause a great depression for everyone leading to yet another drop in demand.

I cannot move enough people around each month with the 100,000 limit to stabilize the hiring rates leading to yet more losses. It's been like that since the game started killing everyone off.

To top it all one of my countries had an earthquake and something like 8 companies went poof into the ether even though I had disaster resources lined up. Some were mining companies that are the few that make money. Guess what...now I can't rebuild the mining ones. Go figure. I suppose the earthquake just destroyed the copper in the ground or moved the oil out of reach did it??

All my countries used to make 20-50Billion a month. Most barely break even, and my leader is losing 30-50billion a month. I would close the hospitals, which of course would kill off another 10million+, but as I cannot move people around fast enough and frankly there are no profitable companies aside from mining, what's the point other than to prolong the inevitable bankruptcy of the country?

I get times are changing and worlds change but at this point it is just a chore to try and keep things stable and hope for something positive to change.

Whining over, I suppose its just possible I'm mismanaging my countries...

I feel the same like you but w3c continue their song that nothing happened.

What I don't understand how this is not obvious, when most of admin countries are all making losses across the board.

this is the main Andy's country in FB. contains 164M people, and with 240 corporations the profit is, - no profit. how then small countries should survive?




More examples telling how profitable the game is now. All countries and CEOs from Andy account. How after this to tell that game is very profitable when numbers tell the other story



Many things to fix and forum is full of ideas, only if anyone is interested in reading.

I don't know how to do the image posting thing on these forums. So I copied and pasted from my Financial Statement...

Profit & Loss - This Month
Income Cost

Taxes paid by Citizens 66,899.63M SC$ Income tax payments
Health Contributions and Cost 19,041.42M SC$ Spending on health 68,275.23M SC$ Cost of public health
Education Contributions and Cost 9,714.30M SC$ Spending on education 18,156.44M SC$ Cost of education
Interest on Outstanding Loans 0.00M SC$ Income from Interest 0.00M SC$ Interest payment cost
Taxes paid by Corporations 0.00M SC$ Corporate Tax
Profit paid by State Owned Corporations 52,320.93M SC$ Income from State Corporation Profits
Income from Enterprises 36,419.26M SC$ Income From Enterprise Corporations
Social Security Payments 36,971.78M SC$ Social security cost
Transportation System 11,670.48M SC$ Cost of transportation
General Cost of Government 7,791.72M SC$ Cost of government
Total Defense Cost 13,336.05M SC$ Total cost of defence
Income from Dividend 0.00M SC$ Income From Dividend
Beginners Income Booster 0.00M SC$ Income Boost for Beginners

Total Income and Cost 184,395.55M SC$ Total Income 156,201.70M SC$ Total cost
Profit / Shortage 28,193.85M SC$ Total Profit This Month


I have 500 Salary index, for Corporations.
505 Salary Index for Government workers.
219 Healthcare Index.
170 Education Index.
Social Security 80% of Low Level Worker Average Wages.
Consumption Quality Index 248.
0% Corporate Tax, with lots of CEO Corps, from other players.
65% Profit Transfer.
Corporations buy supplies at 220Q.

So I'm hardly optimized for profitability.
Where is everyone else's profit going?

Daniel, it is easy to upload any picture, please check formating page

Your text is hard to read, please learn how to add pictures to clarify yourself better.

Also, you probably understand that i don't say that all countries are making loses? Your profitability is actually very low having in mind that you know game very well. 114M people and only 28b profit, i would not post that on forum.

Could barely make sense of that page, talk about unnecessarily complex.

Only for it to fail saying it had to be in .JPEG
I only know how to take screenshots in .PNG on my desktop.

I take screenshots by pasting them into paint, cropping the photo, then saving it. It saves them into .png file. I don't know how you do it, but it doesn't let me upload them, because it's not jpeg

Edit; I found a way to save it as a GIF, that seemed to let the forum accept it