W3C - Game news April 17

1. War Level 9 and 10

War levels 9 and 10 are now added to Simcountry but the exact power of the C3 countries at these levels may be tuned in the coming weeks. At the same time, 1 stealth bomber unit is added to C3 countries in war level 7. More such units are available to C3 countries in level 8 and many more in war level 9 and 10.

2. Game levels update

Moving up the game levels (playing the full game including the war option), is now possible either with a very high defense and defensive indexes or by moving up the war levels. As we have announced before, he requirements for the defense indexes will in time increase and moving up the game levels will require a high war level.

The defense and defensive index requirements have now increased by 5 points. Reaching higher game levels remains possible by building a large army but fighting to reach a higher war level becomes a more attractive option.

More such changes in the future will phase out the defense indexes as a way to increase game levels.

Reaching higher game levels while playing the game including the war option will depend on the fighting capabilities of the country rather than its capability to purchase weapons.

3. More reductions in numbers

As published last week, the next round of reductions in numbers will become fully effective in the coming days. The reduction is gradual and will take effect in some areas earlier and in some later, depending on existing stocks of products that were bought before the change and production in corporations, using existing raw materials while a reduction in the cost of work will take effect earlier.

4. A reduction in the size of Air Force Units

As announced before, most air force units have been reduced in size by about 10-15%. The reduction is only affecting new air force units and will not have any influence on the existing air force units.

Stealth bomber units and air transport units are not changed at all.

5. The Migration index

The migration index is influenced by general conditions in the country and its welfare. A high migration index results in migration into the country from other countries where the migration index is low.

Countries that are selling their population will see their migration index plunge as the population is never happy about the prospect of being moved to another country.

This will trigger larger scale migration out of the country. The numbers will start at 50.000 per game month. In general 0.1% of the population will migrate each game month.

The best way to negate the results of population sales is but quickly purchasing population.

The results of the sale of population in one country is felt all the countries in the empire. Selling population has also a very negative effect on the welfare index of the empire and productivity in its corporations. This was published before.

Several changes to the migration index will take place in the coming weeks.

6. Selling products and requesting a price above their quality

This strategy used to be very popular and produced results. We have advised against it and current declines in product quality will make such a strategy less and less profitable.

7. Automatic selling of products.

As announced before, countries that are in fact bankrupt, are now selling a small amount of products, automatically to try and restore their financial situation.

The sale only takes place if the country has more than -1T in cash (meaning that is has another 16T in loans). And the player is experienced enough to understand what he needs to do but he doesn't.

The feature can be turned off easily but a transfer of funds into the country, making sure the cash is positive. There is no need to pay back all loans.

There are only a small number of such countries and they have also stopped placing orders for products they need. This results in negative stocks of products that will be ordered once the country has some cash.

We do not think that a country should land in such a situation and it should in fact be declared bankrupt and removed. This feature is a measure of last resort to prevent bankruptcy.

After using this feature for some time, we may decide that it helps these countries or if it does not, declare them bankrupt and removed them from the empire. As with all bankruptcies, other countries in the empire will inherit all cash of these countries and all loans too.

-1 to all new updates

^

#3........-1

-1

lol. okay then.

-1

Andy, please would you give us some warning in future when you are about to change the worker balance in corporations.

I woke up yesterday to find every single country in my empire was seriously short of some types of worker, with large surpluses of other types. And I mean seriously short. For example, between 2,000 and 8,000 High Tech Executives needed for full employment, when I had 2,000 unemployed the day before. Even with a good Education Index and my education priorities ramped right up, I can only graduate around 700 per month. This is going to take me days of hard work to recover.

A week's warning of exactly what the changes were going to be would have allowed us to calculate how many extra would be needed and to build up the numbers of unemployed to deal with the change when it was implemented. There's no reason not to warn us and it will save a lot of player frustration and complaints if you do so in future.

Hugs and respect

Jo

No changes what so ever.

The changes in the work force in corporations were a weekly repeating feature for a very long period and we have recently explained again, that small changes will continue and corporate work force will be increase and may reach an average of 300.000 at some point.

however, due to many number reduction changes, all work force updates have been suspended in the past several weeks as it is hard to predict their influence within the model.

so last Tuesday, and at least the two Tuesdays before, we did not make any changes.
what is always ongoing, and unchanged, is the change in manpower that results from the upgrading of corporate efficiency.

other than that, it could be a sudden hiring or decline in hiring.

we do not think that additional advanced warning is needed as we have explained this long term changes that will continue at a low pace once the current dust storm subsides.

The very same thing happened to my empire on GR.

I fixed what I needed to fix, and cut off the efficiency upgrades for right now.

I thought it was the beginnings of a retirement bubble, but there are no signs of that happening presently.

Andy - something has happened and, if it's not a change in the staffing of corps, I'd be very grateful if you could look at the Hanky Panky Hippy Land empire on White Giant and tell me what you think it is!

I have retirement bubbles in all the countries, but I am monitoring the population and worker declines very closely, there have been no sudden movements anywhere and most of them are slowly improving, so it's not that. 90% of the corps are fully upgraded, and the ones that aren't have been steadily upgrading for years without any sudden jumps, so it's not upgrades. I haven't built a new corporation in the country for over a year and a half, so it can't be that.

Take a look at the graph of total employed HT Execs

Now compare it to the number of HT Execs needed for 100% production

That's 3,000 extra employed and almost 8,000 more needed in the space of a month or so, from a very stable basis.

This has happened in every country in my empire, suddenly, and with every country in my Snake Charmer empire on Golden Rainbow as well, all in the same month. And not just with HT Execs. It has happened with MLWs, HLWs, LLMs, MLMs, Execs and HTSs as well, although not quite so badly. And it has gone the opposite way with LLWs and HTEs. In contrast, Teachers and Medical staff have stayed pretty stable.

If you haven't made any sudden changes to the game, Andy, I know that the only changes I have made to my empire recently is to reduce government salaries, and I don't think that can be responsible for such a dramatic surge. I'm more than happy to accept that it is something I don't yet understand, but I am completely baffled as to what it might be. Any explanation you can give me would be greatly appreciated.

Hugs and respect

Jo

The same thing happened in my country. Perhaps it is something to do with the upgrading? I noticed recently that a new corp of mine didn't get any upgrades for ages...they simply weren't delivered, and then all of a sudden it shot up by about 5 or 6. I wonder if it is possible that this is what has happened all over the worlds.

It isn't likely to be upgrades, Craig. When you upgrade, you typically end up with more LLMs and fewer HTEs. I'm experiencing the opposite ... across all 15 countries!

Andy, when you say that updates in workforce were suspended for around 3 weeks, did they then all happen at once? Were there 3 or 4 weeks of workforce changes all together in this week's update? If so, that would probably explain it ...

If not, any ideas you have would be gratefully received.

Hugs and respect

Jo

PS: Thanks for implementing WLs 9 & 10!

Andy, what Jo has seen I have also seen very recently, (a day or so). Losses of most worker types, large losses, and I have seen real years of number fluctuations so I am sorry to say that is not down to efficiency upgrades or new corps or any such action.

You are obviously convinced there has been no recent changes, in which case I might suggest that another engineer there has erroneously activated an update piece of code without anyone there realising it.

Like Jo, I will restore balance.
Like Jo, I ask you inform us in advance as you often have done before.
Like on previous issues, I urge you to look further into it to ensure nothing went wrong without your knowledge, and implement some policy that catches these abnormalities that we seem to experience but you have no knowledge of.

Thanks for your time, Crafty.

Agree

The only thing I could find out was an automatic adjustment of staff in hospitals and universities.
the numbers are very small, 10 here or there.
in large countries it could indeed amount to a couple of thousands.
It probably happened when recent reductions in costs, bumped the totals against some floor value. I did not see this for a very long time.
There were absolutely no changes in corporations.

How many universities and hospitals do you have?
let me know and I will check further.

The cost of both health and education is fluctuating some but the trend recently, as with everything, is down.

What the f...

Since when did it take 3000 missiles to destroy 1 heli wing @ level 7... those missiles are at Q250 too! !!!!!

Andy if it's hospitals or universities ... those adjustments must not have included university teachers or medical staff and only 'normal' workers. Could that be what happened?

I'm looking at 10,000 HT Execs here. I have a lot of hospitals and universities (200+ Unis and almost 2,000 hospitals), and it would take an increase of 5 HT Execs per university / hospital to affect my HT Exec worker balance to that extent. But that's just HT Execs. It's also MLWs, HLWs, LLMs, MLMs, HLMs, Execs and HTSs. Would that account for it?

If so, you may think the numbers are small, and they probably are for a country with only 10M population, but for a large established empire, when it means a shortage of 10,000 HT Execs, it has a serious effect. Especially when you take into account that a good Education Index and a high Education priority will only yield around 700 graduate HT Execs per month

Cost isn't the main issue. The only thing that is affecting finance at the moment is that most of my private corps are experiencing worker shortages and making less of a profit / more of a loss. I only hope they bear with me while I sort it out, and don't move their corps out of my country in frustration!

Hugs and respect

Jo

Hi Jo,

I have had the same effect in my very much smaller land - going from an over supply of HT Execs to suddenly a serious and huge shortage of them. My overall employment went from above 96% to about 92%, and still falling, despite my best efforts to make HT Execs.

https://sim05.simcountry.com/cgi-bin/cgi2nova?SN_ADDRESS=wwwCountry&SN_METHOD=w3graph&miTable=cntrhist&miKey=738&miColumn=vCmainEmploymentIndex

I have put 50 of my 120 priority points into training HT Execs, and the amount of unemployed HT Execs is growing each turn, and the amount needed for full employment is falling, but still my overall employment is decreasing.

Here is my graduations of new HT Execs, in response to the crisis:

https://sim05.simcountry.com/cgi-bin/cgi2nova?SN_ADDRESS=wwwCountry&SN_METHOD=w3graph&miTable=cntrhist&miKey=738&miColumn=vCHighTechExecutiveEducationOutput

But I have almost caught up on the HT Execs, and will need to shift some priority points over to HT Engineers soon.

John Gilbert

Jo,

what is the population of the country where it happened.
the update was only universities and hospitals and did not involve any of the professionals.

The function is limited to a very small update and I am surprised by the scale.

Yeah, I only needed some 4,000,000 HTEngineers for 100% hiring on LU. I had to resort to relocating my ceo corps in my country to another country.

On the bright side I'm down to around 2.25M left. That is a %50 improvement...ugh...yay?

Actually, I'm changing my -1 to a -0.1

Thankyou so much for looking into this Andy.

All 10 of my WG countries have been hit, and all 5 of my GR countries, but the specifics of the one that has been worst hit (quoted as an example above) are as follows:

Hanky Panky Hippy Land on WG
Population (at the time of the occurrance): 101.3M
Date of occurrence: June 2929
Immediate impact on employed workers (very approximate numbers):
LLW: -300,000
MLW: +80,000
HLW: +60,000
LLM: +45,000
MLM: +70,000
HLM: +30,000
Exec: +3,500
HTE: -150,000
HTS: +30,000
HT Exec: +7,200
Teacher: no change
Uni Teacher: no change
Nurse: no change
Doctor: no change
S. Doctor: no change

The other nine countries in my empire range in population from 82.3M up to 100.3M and they were all hit in a similar way. Hanky Panky Hippy Land was worst hit and second worst was Holiday Hippy Land with a population of 84.2M.

As well as the people reporting a similar problem on this thread, 4 other players have told me they also have a serious problem with changed worker numbers.

I have been buying population to try to address the problem, Andy, so if you look at the countries today you will see slightly different figures. The history graphs should give you a fairly accurate picture, though.

Thank you again for looking into it.

Hugs and respect

Jo

This happens to everyone's country Andy. Every one of mine has been effected like this. Why don't you ask the population for ALL of our countries?

Because he is in denial, possibly delusional. He lives in a world of finite numbers, ratios, equations, and game theory where nothing could ever go wrong unless you did it.

C'mon guys, be fair! This is a game of finite numbers and equations. It's run by a computer, so it never does anything random. If something has happened that the GMs didn't expect, it's because one thing has affected another that they didn't plan for, or a wrong number or formula has been entered, or the right one in the wrong place.

Andy's asking about the population in my country because it's easier for him to look at one example for which he has lots of data, to work out what might have happened. If he can find the answer, it will benefit all of us.

At least give him credit for not ignoring the problem, but working with us to find what has happened!

Hugs and respect

Jo